“If you’re I politics and you can’t tell when you walk into a room who’s for you and who’s against you, then you’re in the wrong line of work.”

All men are created equal’, ‘government by consent of the governed’, ‘give me liberty or give me death’. Well, those are not just clever words, or those are not just empty theories.

It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.

If you have a mother-in-law with only one eye and she has it in the center of her forehead, don’t keep her in the living room.

Education will not cure all the problems of society, but without it no cure for any problem is possible.

Of course, I may go into a strange bedroom every now and then that I don’t want you to write about, but otherwise you can write everything.

The poor suffer twice at the rioter’s hands. First, his destructive fury scars their neighborhood; second, the atmosphere of accommodation and consent is changed to one of hostility and resentment.

If we must disagree, let’s disagree without being disagreeable.

To hunger for use and to go unused is the worst hunger of all.

I will not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

Greater love hath no man than to attend the Episcopal Church with his wife.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole.

When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse. I could be a mayor.

There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this: Deny your responsibility.

Life is never easy. There is work to be done and obligations to be met – obligations to truth, to justice, and to liberty.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim.’

Politics, when it is an art and a service, not an exploitation, is about acting for an ideal through realities.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

Soft money will find its way and seep into the political system and corrode it, unless we plug every hole.

In politics, merit is rewarded by the possessor being raised, like a target, to a position to be fired at.

In politics it is necessary either to betray one’s country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.

Political activity alone cannot make a man free. Back of the ballot, he must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence, and character.

I see people like me, who thought someone like me couldn’t be in politics, now are saying, ‘Oh, wait, I don’t need to take money from corporations to run. Maybe I’ll run, too.’

I don’t think most of Congress understands how economics works.