All people are most credulous when they are most happy.

Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.

A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.

It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.

But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.