Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

The worst government is the most moral.

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.

A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.

If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.