Every country has the government it deserves.

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

Politics is the art of the possible.

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.

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.

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

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

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

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

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

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.