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

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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

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

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.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

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

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

Every country has the government it deserves.

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