Envy is the basis of democracy.

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

Politics is the art of the possible.

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”