You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

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.

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

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

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.

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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

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 most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

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

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