Unchecked 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.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

The kings are ravenous beasts, their ministers are dogs.

Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual. Reality always creeps in--the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

America is ungovernable. He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.

When government gets too big, freedom is lost. Government is supposed to be the servant. But when a government can tax the people with no limit or restraint on what the government can take, then the government has become the master.

Trouble is, we call politics a game, but it isn't one. There is no referee, and the teams make up the rules as they go along. You can't cry foul or offside in politics. Almost anything goes.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

The federal judiciary is an irresponsible body … working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction ...

No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things - once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.

Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.

The tyranny we impose on others, we will eventually impose on ourselves.

Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.

The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special movements into the jaws of that which feeds them.

The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.

Power is like a drug. The more you use it, the larger doses you need.

Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.