What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

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

Envy is the basis of democracy.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

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.

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.