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

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

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

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

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

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

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

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

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

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

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.