Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of
those who possess it.”
– William Pitt
The Point: William Pitt
Tyranny anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.
Alex Storozynski
The contest for all ages has been to rescue Liberty from the grasp of executive power.
Daniel Webster
The means of against foreign danger have always been the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending have enslaved the people.
James Madison
Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of "emergency". It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe...And "emergency" became the justification of subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.
Herbert Hoover
Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?
Alexander Hamilton
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) my menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
HL Mencken
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Alex Storozynski
The contest for all ages has been to rescue Liberty from the grasp of executive power.
Daniel Webster
When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.
When the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.
Thomas Jefferson
The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
James Madison
Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
James Madison
Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation.
Justice William O Douglas
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
When the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.
Thomas Jefferson
The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
James Madison
Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
James Madison
Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation.
Justice William O Douglas
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Aesop
Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.
Jeremy Bentham
Justice without force is important. Force without justice is tyranny.
Blaise Pascal
The concentrating [of powers] in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one.
Thomas Jefferson
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many; and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elected - may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
James Madison
Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth; and let me remind you that they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny.
Barry Goldwater
Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.
Jeremy Bentham
Justice without force is important. Force without justice is tyranny.
Blaise Pascal
The concentrating [of powers] in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one.
Thomas Jefferson
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many; and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elected - may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
James Madison
Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth; and let me remind you that they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny.
Barry Goldwater
In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power. Love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness - such as pride, cunning and cruelty
Leo Tolstoi
A democratic despotism is like theocracy; it assumes its own correctness.
Walter Bagehot
This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues,
Was once thought honest.
William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton
Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know my Lords, that where law ends, tyranny begins.
Lord Chatham
Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition was the cause of all these evils.
Thucydides
The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
A fondness for power is implanted in most men; and it is natural to abuse it when acquired.
Alexander Hamilton
Nature has left this tincture in the blood,
That all men would be tyrants if they could.
Daniel Defoe
Experience hath shown, that even under the best form of government - those entrusted with power, have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it to tyranny.
Leo Tolstoi
A democratic despotism is like theocracy; it assumes its own correctness.
Walter Bagehot
This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues,
Was once thought honest.
William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton
Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know my Lords, that where law ends, tyranny begins.
Lord Chatham
Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition was the cause of all these evils.
Thucydides
The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
A fondness for power is implanted in most men; and it is natural to abuse it when acquired.
Alexander Hamilton
Nature has left this tincture in the blood,
That all men would be tyrants if they could.
Daniel Defoe
Experience hath shown, that even under the best form of government - those entrusted with power, have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it to tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson
The greater the power the more dangerous the abuse.
Edmund Burke
Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim that can preserve the liberties of any people.
John Adams
There is no slippery slope toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must be first tolerated by the people and their leaders.
Alan K Simpson
Tyranny seldom announces itself...In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical.
Joseph Sobran
American tyranny has come gradually, like a slow rising river. Each of us does not realize the danger until the water comes to our door. Until then, it is merely someone elses' problem and a problem that we fool ourselves into thinking won't reach us.
Charlie Reese
Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Thomas Paine
The greater the power the more dangerous the abuse.
Edmund Burke
Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim that can preserve the liberties of any people.
John Adams
There is no slippery slope toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must be first tolerated by the people and their leaders.
Alan K Simpson
Tyranny seldom announces itself...In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical.
Joseph Sobran
American tyranny has come gradually, like a slow rising river. Each of us does not realize the danger until the water comes to our door. Until then, it is merely someone elses' problem and a problem that we fool ourselves into thinking won't reach us.
Charlie Reese
Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Thomas Paine
Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.
Woodrow Wilson
Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of a private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in essence is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
Franklin D Roosevelt
The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or limited sovereignty, or absolute power is the same [whether] in a majority of a popular assembly; an aristocratic council; or oligarchical junto and a single emperor - equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and in every respect diabolical.
John Adams
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master.
He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual characters, intentions or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born to supersede the necessity of their having any.
If he were to make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned - would never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die.
Charles Dickens (Bleak House)
Authority intoxicates,
And makes mere sots of magistrates;
The fumes of it invade the brain,
And make men giddy,
Proud and vain.
Samuel Butler
We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather bed.
Thomas Jefferson
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants.
William Pitt
"Useful" and "necessary" was always the tyrant's plea.
CS Lewis
Woodrow Wilson
Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of a private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in essence is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
Franklin D Roosevelt
The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or limited sovereignty, or absolute power is the same [whether] in a majority of a popular assembly; an aristocratic council; or oligarchical junto and a single emperor - equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and in every respect diabolical.
John Adams
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master.
He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual characters, intentions or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born to supersede the necessity of their having any.
If he were to make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned - would never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die.
Charles Dickens (Bleak House)
Authority intoxicates,
And makes mere sots of magistrates;
The fumes of it invade the brain,
And make men giddy,
Proud and vain.
Samuel Butler
We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather bed.
Thomas Jefferson
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants.
William Pitt
"Useful" and "necessary" was always the tyrant's plea.
CS Lewis
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.
Albert Camus
Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not it's inhumanity, but it's anti-humanity.
Eric Hoffer
The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness...This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
Plato
The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.
Thomas Paine
How strangely will the tools of a tyrant pervert the plain meaning of words.
Samuel Adams
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.
There are men of all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
Daniel Webster
In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism or religion or both to deceive and overawe the people.
Albert Camus
Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not it's inhumanity, but it's anti-humanity.
Eric Hoffer
The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness...This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
Plato
The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.
Thomas Paine
How strangely will the tools of a tyrant pervert the plain meaning of words.
Samuel Adams
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.
There are men of all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
Daniel Webster
In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism or religion or both to deceive and overawe the people.
OH Canton
The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke
When one with honeyed words but evil mind
Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.
Euripides
Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.
Lysander Spooner
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers only have to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny.
William E Channing
The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke
When one with honeyed words but evil mind
Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.
Euripides
Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.
Lysander Spooner
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers only have to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny.
William E Channing
By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master
Demosthenes
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
Plato
Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.
James Madison
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
James Madison
The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
James Madison
A good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection.
Crystal Eastman
Friedrich August von Hayek
Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master
Demosthenes
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
Plato
Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.
James Madison
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
James Madison
The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
James Madison
A good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection.
Crystal Eastman
The means of against foreign danger have always been the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending have enslaved the people.
James Madison
Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of "emergency". It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe...And "emergency" became the justification of subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.
Herbert Hoover
Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?
Alexander Hamilton
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) my menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
HL Mencken
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the suspension of the Weimar constitution after the Reichstag Fire [Decree].
Srdja Trifkovic
Emergency does not create power. Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved.
The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. It's grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency.
Justice Charles Evans Hughes
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear - a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens, and real diseases are useful material
Susan Sontang
The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.
Vance Packard
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal".
Martin Luther King
The mission of the Gestapo expanded steadily as from 1933 onward, "political criminality" was given a much broader definition than ever before and more forms of dissent and criticism were gradually criminalized. The result was that more "laws" or law-like measures were put on the books than ever."
Sheila Fitzpatrick
In germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.
Rev Martin Niemoeller
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When "Somebody Up There" - a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator - so decrees.
Jessica Mitford
When it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
John Viscount Morley
No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words "no" or "not" employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.
Rev Edmund Opitz
If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it.
Erich Fromm
A legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law.
Justice John Marshall
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Edmund Burke
There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
Charles de Montesquieu
The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost when the legislative power is dominated by the executive.
Edward Gibbon
A decision by the Fuhrer in the express form of a law or a decree may not be scrutinized by a judge. In addition, the judge is bound by any other decision of the Fuhrer.
Adolf Hitler
Peace without justice is tyranny
William Allen White
The object of any tyrant would be to overthrow or diminish trial by jury, for it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.
Sir Patrick Devlin
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Ayn Rand
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office
Aesop
Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue.
They support the laws before destroying them.
Voltaire
No one is an unjust villain in his own mind.
Even - perhaps even especially those who are the worst of us.
Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices they would call "hard but necessary" for the good of their nation.
We're all the hero of our own story.
Jim Butcher
The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth.
Bill Clinton
Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom not tyranny; democracy not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.
Tony Blair
Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal
constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure conformity, but one that removes awareness of other possibilities.
Alan Bloom
For people to rule themselves in a republic. they must have virtue; for a tyrant to rule in a tyranny, he must use fear.
William J Federer
The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen - a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life.
Justice William O Douglas
Authoritarian methods do not produce independence; they reinforce dependence.
Elaine Heffner
It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disenfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.
WEB Du Bois
Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
Charles Peguy
[It is a basic principle of a tyrant] to unarm his people of weapons, money and all means whereby they resist his power.
Sir Walter Raleigh
The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.
Emily Greens Balch
I have sworn upon the alter of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Thomas Jefferson
Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
Thomas Jefferson
Both Oligarch and Tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of arms.
Aristotle
Tyrants are seldom free. The cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
George Santayana
For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends.
Aeschylus
Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one that rises against them and strikes back.
JK Rowling
You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their heart there is unspoken, unspeakable fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts. Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse, a little tiny mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.
Winston Churchill
Rebellion to tyranny is obedience to God.
Thomas Jefferson
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
Edward Abbey
Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once; all he has to do now is to "educate the people" so that they wil have one common mind to delude.
Richard Mitchell
Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.
Robin Morgan
The closed door and the sealed lips are prerequisites to tyranny.
Frank L Stanton
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
Robert Heinlein
To prevent inquiry is amongst the worst of evils.
Thomas Holcroft
To silence criticism is to silence freedom.
Sidney Hook
The framers of the Constitution knew that free speech is the friend of change and the revolution. But they also knew that it is always the deadliest enemy of tyranny.
Hugo Black
Seditious libel is the doctrine that flourished in England during and after the Star Chamber. It is the hallmark of closed societies throughout the world. Under it, criticism of government is viewed as defamation and punished as a crime.
Harry Kalven Jr
Once a government is committed to silencing the voice of the opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
Harry S Truman
The weapon of the dictator is not so much propaganda as censorship.
TH Qualter
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
Henry Steele Commager
All tyranny needs to gain foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
Thomas Jefferson
A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
Bertrand de Jouvenal
The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
Plato
Silent acquiescence in the face of tyranny is no better than outright agreement.
CJ Redwine
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps perpetuate it,
Martin Luther King
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Bishop Benjamin Tutu
So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so. For tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles on sleeping men.
Voltaire
If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time - but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Abraham Lincoln
For you see, the world is controlled by very different personages from what is imagined by those not behind the scenes.
Benjamin Disraeli
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa - treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed and wasted at will.
Eric Hoffer
The real truth of the matter is, as you know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.
Franklin D Roosevelt
History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violet means to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance.
James Madison
Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.
James Garfield
It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking or monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
Henry Ford
Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside of Congree and manipulates the credit of the United States.
Barry Goldwater
A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and very powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks.
John C Calhoun
The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities and nation.
At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as "international bankers".
This little coterie ... run our government for their own selfish ends.
It operates under cover of a self-created screen...[and] seizes...our executive orders...our legislative bodies...schools...courts...newspapers and every agency created for public protection.
John F Hylan
Let us not be defeated by the tyranny of the world financial markets that threaten peace and democracy everywhere.
Stephane Hessel
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
Friedrich August von Hayek
If you are afraid to speak against tyranny, then you are already a slave.
John Bryant
You may also be interested in some of the quotes on topics central to this site...
Srdja Trifkovic
Emergency does not create power. Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved.
The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. It's grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency.
Justice Charles Evans Hughes
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear - a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens, and real diseases are useful material
Susan Sontang
The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.
Vance Packard
Martin Luther King
The mission of the Gestapo expanded steadily as from 1933 onward, "political criminality" was given a much broader definition than ever before and more forms of dissent and criticism were gradually criminalized. The result was that more "laws" or law-like measures were put on the books than ever."
Sheila Fitzpatrick
In germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.
Rev Martin Niemoeller
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When "Somebody Up There" - a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator - so decrees.
Jessica Mitford
When it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
John Viscount Morley
No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words "no" or "not" employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.Rev Edmund Opitz
If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it.
Erich Fromm
A legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law.
Justice John Marshall
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Edmund Burke
There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
Charles de Montesquieu
The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost when the legislative power is dominated by the executive.
Edward Gibbon
A decision by the Fuhrer in the express form of a law or a decree may not be scrutinized by a judge. In addition, the judge is bound by any other decision of the Fuhrer.
Adolf Hitler
Peace without justice is tyranny
William Allen White
The object of any tyrant would be to overthrow or diminish trial by jury, for it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.
Sir Patrick Devlin
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Ayn Rand
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office
Aesop
They support the laws before destroying them.
Voltaire
No one is an unjust villain in his own mind.
Even - perhaps even especially those who are the worst of us.
Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices they would call "hard but necessary" for the good of their nation.
We're all the hero of our own story.
Jim Butcher
The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth.
Bill Clinton
Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom not tyranny; democracy not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.
Tony Blair
Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal
Alan Bloom
For people to rule themselves in a republic. they must have virtue; for a tyrant to rule in a tyranny, he must use fear.
William J Federer
The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen - a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life.
Justice William O Douglas
Authoritarian methods do not produce independence; they reinforce dependence.
Elaine Heffner
It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disenfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.
WEB Du Bois
Charles Peguy
[It is a basic principle of a tyrant] to unarm his people of weapons, money and all means whereby they resist his power.
Sir Walter Raleigh
The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.
Emily Greens Balch
I have sworn upon the alter of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Thomas Jefferson
Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
Thomas Jefferson
Both Oligarch and Tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of arms.
Aristotle
Tyrants are seldom free. The cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
George Santayana
For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends.
Aeschylus
Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one that rises against them and strikes back.
JK Rowling
You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their heart there is unspoken, unspeakable fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts. Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse, a little tiny mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.
Winston Churchill
Rebellion to tyranny is obedience to God.
Thomas Jefferson
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
Edward Abbey
Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once; all he has to do now is to "educate the people" so that they wil have one common mind to delude.
Richard Mitchell
Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.
Robin Morgan
Frank L Stanton
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
Robert Heinlein
To prevent inquiry is amongst the worst of evils.
Thomas Holcroft
To silence criticism is to silence freedom.
Sidney Hook
The framers of the Constitution knew that free speech is the friend of change and the revolution. But they also knew that it is always the deadliest enemy of tyranny.
Hugo Black
Seditious libel is the doctrine that flourished in England during and after the Star Chamber. It is the hallmark of closed societies throughout the world. Under it, criticism of government is viewed as defamation and punished as a crime.
Harry Kalven Jr
Once a government is committed to silencing the voice of the opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
Harry S Truman
The weapon of the dictator is not so much propaganda as censorship.
TH Qualter
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
Henry Steele Commager
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
I know not why any one but a school boy in his declamation would whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they were rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves and of one another.
Samuel Johnson
The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
George Orwell
Samuel Johnson
The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
George Orwell
Thomas Jefferson
A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
Bertrand de Jouvenal
The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
Plato
Silent acquiescence in the face of tyranny is no better than outright agreement.
CJ Redwine
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps perpetuate it,
Martin Luther King
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Bishop Benjamin Tutu
Voltaire
If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time - but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Abraham Lincoln
For you see, the world is controlled by very different personages from what is imagined by those not behind the scenes.
Benjamin Disraeli
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa - treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed and wasted at will.
Eric Hoffer
The real truth of the matter is, as you know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.
Franklin D Roosevelt
History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violet means to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance.James Madison
James Garfield
It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking or monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
Henry Ford
Barry Goldwater
A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and very powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks.
John C Calhoun
The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities and nation.At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as "international bankers".
This little coterie ... run our government for their own selfish ends.
It operates under cover of a self-created screen...[and] seizes...our executive orders...our legislative bodies...schools...courts...newspapers and every agency created for public protection.
John F Hylan
Let us not be defeated by the tyranny of the world financial markets that threaten peace and democracy everywhere.
Stephane Hessel
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
Friedrich August von Hayek
If you are afraid to speak against tyranny, then you are already a slave.
John Bryant
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
You may also be interested in some of the quotes on topics central to this site...
Quotes on Accountability, Liability and Answerability
Quotes on Integrity, Honor, Principles and Character
Quotes on Tyranny, Authoritarianism, Dictatorship etc and Liberty Quotes related to this theme
Quotes on Lies and Deception
Quotes on Politics and by Politicians
Quotes on Responsibility, Onus and Obligation
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