Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

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

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

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.

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.

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

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

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

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

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.

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

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.