Concentration of Power Quotes

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men

Concentration of power in a political machine is bad..

Progressives think progress depends upon (that is, they sometimes define progress as) the concentration of power as high as possible in government’s regulatory apparatus. Hence, between 1960 and 2019, the 900 percent increase in federal grants to states — from $70 billion (adjusted for inflation) to $700 billion — came with strings, resembling chains, attached.

The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.

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

A unity of the Executive would be necessary in order to promote dispatch; -that a plurality of Persons would never do. When I was in Holland the States general were obliged to give up their power to a French Man to direct their military operations…. However power is always increasing on the part of the Executive

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.

The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.

Overly concentrated power, whether in public, private or even in civic hands is an invitation to abuse.

For thousands of years, the natural tendency of elites everywhere has been to monopolize power rather than restrain it.

Regulation has crept up on us steadily…. The most alarming feature of this concentration of power in the Federal government is the creation of omnipotent commissions to exercise it. The new fields of Federal control are administered by small Boards or executive commissions, usually appointed by the President and responsible to no one but the President. They are part of the Executive Department. But their function is not executive only. They have two additional functions: one is legislative, the other is judicial. These commissions write the rules which make the laws effective. Then they administer the rules; and when the rules are violated, they it in judgment on the violations.

It's a big and growing problem, the amount of power possessed by Google and Facebook. President Eisenhower said it about the military-industrial complex. They pose a grave threat to our democracy.

Trump makes really, really powerful arguments, for example in relation to healthcare. He talks about the cartels and the concentration of power and the health insurance companies effectively having monopolies and ripping people off.

Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.

People don't seem to understand that the separation of powers is not about the power of these branches; it's there to protect individual liberty - it's there to protect us from the concentration of power.

Their whole civil policy was adverse to concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals.

Politically, resistance to industrialism must force the viability of industrial society into public consciousness and debate. What purpose does this machine serve? What problem has become so great that it needs this solution? Is this invention nothing but, as Thoreau put it, an improved means to an unimproved end? Who are the winners? Who are the losers? Will this invention concentrate or disperse power, encourage or discourage self worth? Can society at large afford it? Can the biosphere?

The dark side of our modern technological age is that more and more killing power is getting into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.

What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and power into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate.

The Media are corporations so... It's the concentrations of private power which have an enormous, not total control, but enormous influence over Congress and the White House and that's increasing sharply with sharp concentration of private power and escalating cost of elections and so on.

Unless combated and overcome by social and political action, the influence of the new industrial and technological order favors the concentration of wealth, power and decision-making in the hands of a small public or private controlling group.

The abolition of the presidential term limit and President Xi Jinping's concentration of power have come as an unwelcome surprise to many.

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows.

You can think of all the things a Congress or a legislature does, and then you kind of overshadow that with the fact that a few people are going to make those decisions.

This administration seems intent on accumulating unchecked power.