Philipp Brunnow Quotes

Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who posses it; and this I know, my lords: that where law ends, tyranny begins.

Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases.

Brutal men with unlimited power are the same all over the world.

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and whenever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.

the Distress of our oppressed Country, which now unjustly feels the baneful Effects of arbitrary Power.

Power tends to corrupt if you're there too long.

... a consolidation of unchecked and despotic power in the House of Representatives ...

… we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced on his throne.

The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

To assume all the powers is not good for anybody. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All those experiments have a bad ending.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.

The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization.

Yes, citizens, Iturbide was a traitor, a hypocrite and an impious man who destroyed the assembly in which the people had deposited their sovereignty in order to appropriate it all to himself

... all of our human experience shows that no one with absolute power can be trusted to give it up even in part.