John Adams Quotes

The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Power tends to get confused with repression.

Watch out for the man who talks of putting things in order. Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.

You must labor until we have dominion over the minds and bodies of every important person in your nation.

The Authority has the power to turn everyone against me, and they have.

It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

You carry forever the fingerprint that comes from being under someone's thumb.

The power that is supported by force alone will have cause often to tremble.

Back in those days intimidation was the greatest tool the drill instructor had. Without that tool, he would not have had control.

Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.

Sometimes fear is used as a way to control.

Anyone who goes against my decisions, I liquidate him

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

Don’t you shit me George. You and I know who has the power in Alabama.

The silence of peoples is something kings should study.

Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.

Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.

The more pain you inflict on someone, the more they will tell you what they think you want to hear.

Those who fear men like laws.

Let people hate you so long as they fear you.