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.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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

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

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

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.

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

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

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.

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

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

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

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.