Politics and 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.

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.

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.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

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

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

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

A party is perpetually corrupted by personality.

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

A nation never falls but by suicide.

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 desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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