Politics and Power

At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?

Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive “owners,” who each in turn, as “patriots,” with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did —and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.

Bill Styles . . . spoke of the low grade of legislative morals. “Kind of discouraging. You see, it’s so hard to find men of a so high type of morals that they’ll stay bought .”

The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from themass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only—not from its privileged classes.

Here I was, in a country where a right tosay how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. . . . I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.

The chances are that a man cannot get into congress now without resorting to arts and means that should render him unfit to gothere.

To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.

[ On women in the United States :] They live in the midst of a country where there is no end to the laws and no beginning to the execution of them.

The jury system puts a ban upon intelligenceand honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity, and perjury.

When the peremptory challenges wereall exhausted, a jury of twelve men wereimpaneled—a jury who swore that they hadneither heard, read, talked about, nor expressedan opinion concerning a murder which thevery cattle in the corrals, the Indians in thesage-brush, and the stones in the street werecognizant of!

A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence thatprinciple may be enshrined in.

[ On General Douglas MacArthur :] I fired himbecause he wouldn’t respect the authority ofthe President. That’s the answer to that. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the lawfor generals. If it was, half to three-quarters ofthem would be in jail.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities orby outside pressures.

It was the supreme expression of themediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himselfrose to his position.

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of ademocratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it.

Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man ofrank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

Scarcely any question arises in the UnitedStates which does not become, sooner or later, a subject of judicial debate; hence all parties are obliged to borrow the ideas, and even the language usual in judicial proceedings, in their daily controversies. . . . The language of the law thus becomes, in some measure, a vulgar tongue; the spirit of the law, which is produced in the schools and courts of justice, gradually penetrates beyond their walls into the bosom of society, where it descends to the lowest classes, so that the whole people contracts the habits and the tastes of the magistrate.

In America there are no nobles or literarymen, and the people is apt to mistrust thewealthy; lawyers consequently form the highest political class, and the most cultivated circle ofsociety. They have therefore nothing to gain by innovation, which adds a conservative interest to their natural taste for public order. If I were asked where I place the American aristocracy, I should reply without hesitation, that it is notcomposed of the rich, who are united together by no common tie, but that it occupies the judicial bench and the bar.

The more we reflect upon all that occursin the United States, the more shall we be persuaded that the lawyers as a body, form the most powerful, if not the only counterpoise to the democratic element. In that country we perceive how eminently the legal profession is qualified by its powers, and even by its defects, to neutralize the vices which are inherent in popular government.

I cannot believe that a republic could subsist at the present time, if the influence of lawyers in public business did not increase in proportion to the power of the people.

[ Section title :] Tyranny of the Majority.

There is no medium between servitudeand extreme licence; in order to enjoy theinestimable benefits which the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils which it engenders.

In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are numerous factions, but no conspiracies.

The power vested in the American courtsof justice of pronouncing a statute to be unconstitutional, forms one of the most powerful barriers which has ever beendevised against the tyranny of political assemblies.