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.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

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

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

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

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

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.

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.

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.