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

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

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

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

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.

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.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

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.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

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.