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.

Politics is the art of the possible.

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

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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

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

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.

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