You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.

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.

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.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

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

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.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.