Quotes to inspire and reflect

It is an observation no less just than common, that there is no stronger test of a man’s real character than power and authority, exciting, as they do, every passion, and discovering every latent vice.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades—that of government.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

A party is perpetually corrupted by personality.

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

A nation never falls but by suicide.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall.

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Of all the sources of human pride, mere wealth is the basest and most vulgar-minded. Real gentlemen are almost invariably above this low feeling.

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

Laws are like spider’s webs: if some poor weak creature come up against them, it is caught; but a bigger one can break through and get away.

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

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

A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Not Guilty.’

He has been called a mediocre man; but this is unwarranted flattery. He was a politician of monumental littleness.

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism: ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or any other controlling private power.

A people that elect corrupt politicians, impostors, thieves and traitors are not victims . . . but accomplices.”—George Orwell, English author and essayist (1903 – 1950), attributed “He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.

Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.

Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world and ignorance of mankind.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.

Real freedom is freedom from fear, and unless you can live free from fear you cannot live a dignified human life.