You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

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

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.

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.

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

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.

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

Every country has the government it deserves.