Moral Authority Quotes

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Even in war moral power is to physical as three parts out of four.

Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.

I am responsible only to God and history.

The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.

… the most powerful weapon that we have our command to-day is public opinion. Statesmen quail before it and it could move mountains!

The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.

The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.

For a war to be just, three conditions are necessary—public authority, just cause, right motive.

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

People used to behave morally because they thought God was always watching - in some ways God today is the collective, and the collective is watching.

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means - to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal - would bring terrible retributions.

You can't disobey the rules every time you disapprove. However, when you're considering something that constitutes an extreme abridgement of your rights, conscience is the court of last resort.

The voice of the people is the voice of God.

I cannot trust a man to control others who cannot control himself.

Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.

A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for—for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number—becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority

Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness.

The power of example is America’s greatest power in the world.

The strongest is never strong enough to always be the master unless he transforms strength into right…

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

... the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards the right purpose .... Like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people.

Prophet just means intellectual. They were people giving geopolitical analysis, moral lessons, that sort of thing. We call them intellectuals today. There were the people we honor as prophets, there were the people we condemn as false prophets. But if you look at the biblical record, at the time, it was the other way around. The flatterers of the Court of King Ahab were the ones who were honored. The ones we call prophets were driven into the desert and imprisoned.