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

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

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

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

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

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

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.

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

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 first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

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.