Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

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.

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

Politics is the art of the possible.

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

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

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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

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 best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.