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

Every country has the government it deserves.

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

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

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

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.