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

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

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

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

Politics is the art of the possible.

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

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

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

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

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

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.

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