The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

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

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

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.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

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

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

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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

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.

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.