The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

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

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

Every country has the government it deserves.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

Politics is the art of the possible.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.