James Otis Quotes

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.

In a world without the law of God, you have chaos, oppression, tyranny, and everyone doing what is right in their own eyes.

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.

Terrorists destroy randomly.

Nothing endurable can be produced on a soil soaked with blood and moved by violent agitations.

I am the Scourge of God.

It is then a very unseasonable time to plead law, when swords are in the hands of the vulgare, or to think to restrain them with fear of punishments when they look after liberty and shake off all government.

The last king should be strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

War and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.

The masses are principally to be feared because they fly out ever and anon into violence; and from plundering they proceed to the flat levelling of estates.

To say that a bad government must be established for fear of anarchy is really saying that we should kill ourselves for fear of dying.

Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,--a total perversion of opinion;society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live.

War stirs in men's hearts the mud of their worst instincts. It puts a premium on violence, nourishes hatred, and gives free rein to cupidity. It crushes the weak, exalts the unworthy, and bolsters tyranny .. .Time and time again it has destroyed all ordered living, devastated hope, and put the prophets to death.

I am freedom and I will eat your heart

He says-him as was here just now-'When Tom shut up the house, mate, to go to rack, the beds was left, all made, like as if somebody was a-going to sleep in every bed. And if you was to walk through the bedrooms now, you'd see the ragged mouldy bedclothes a heaving and a heaving like seas. And a heaving and a heaving with what?' he says. 'Why, with the rats under 'em.'

Tremble, ye tyrants, for ye can not die.

All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair, law, chance, hath slain.

They make a desert and call it peace.

I would rather be tied to the soil as a serf... than be king of all these dead and destroyed.

This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows.

The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason is terror and force.

Terror, terror, terror. Life was a reign o terror in the shadow of the guillotine.

One man may as easily destroy, as govern: be King or Anti-King.