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.

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

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

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

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.

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

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