"Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth."

Edward Abbey, US anarchist, author, essayist, and radical environmentalist (1927-1989)

"The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others."

Edward Abbey

"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing."

John Adams, (1735-1826) US diplomat, patriot, and Federalist politician, 2nd president of US 1797-1801

"We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."

John Adams, Source: Oct. 11, 1798; Address to the military

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

John Adams

"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service, when it is violating all His laws."

John Adams

"The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a 
possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks."

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) Source: Ponkapog Papers, 1903
"...(A)rguing that the words of the Constitution have no fixed meaning is tantamount to arguing that we have no Constitution; a Constitution serves no purpose if the branches of government it is supposed to limit can define their own powers."

W. James Antle III

"Liberals are constitutionally unable to understand that every tax represents a transfer of power and  freedom from the people to the government."

Linda Bowles

"The tragedy-in-process that moves our country toward socialism is based on the success of liberalism in teaching people to look to big government rather than to themselves for the satisfaction of their needs -- and to man's law, rather than to God's commandments, for moral direction. The ultimate tragedy will consist of a massive redistribution of wealth and power -- not as is commonly believed from one citizen to another, but from all citizens to the government."

Linda Bowles

"Taxes are not just about money. Every tax represents a transfer of power and freedom from the people to the government. The underlying premise of every tax is that the money will do more good in the hands of government than in the hands of the people who earned it."

Linda Bowles

"The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse."

Edmund Burke

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

Edmund Burke

"How can those who are invested with the power of government be prevented from the abuse of those powers as the means of aggrandizing themselves? ... Without a strong constitution to counteract the strong tendency of government to disorder and abuse there can be little progress or improvement."

John C. Calhoun, cited in The South was Right!, James & Walter Kennedy, 1991, p. 150
"All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates."
Frank Chodorov

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."

Winston Churchill, November 21, 1943

"The three great apostles of practical atheism that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are health, wealth, and power."

Charles Caleb Colton

"The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority. Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals."

James Fenimore Cooper, "The American Democrat" (1838)

"The proposition is this: that in a time of war the commander of an armed force . . . 
has the power . . . to suspend all civil rights and their remedies, and subject citizens 
. . . to the rule of his will. . . . If true, republican government is a failure, and
there is an end of liberty regulated by law."

Chief Justice David Davis, ruling for the Supreme Court in Ex Parte Milligan (1866), 
declaring commander in chief Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and other 
denials of due process during the Civil War unconstitutional.

"Our government is an agency of delegated and strictly limited powers. Its founders did not look to its preservation by force; but the chain they wove to bind these States together was one of love and mutual good offices..."

Jefferson Davis

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want
crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or
it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will."

Frederick Douglass
"Our country was founded on a distrust of government. Our founding fathers gave power to the people to keep an eye on government. So when politicians say, 'Trust me,' they're actually being very un-American."

David Duchovny
"Abuse of power isn't limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we're not vigilant."

Clint Eastwood, Source: Parade Magazine, 12 January 1997

"The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"...[O]ur Founding Fathers enshrined a constitutional separation of powers for the ages undeluded by the fantasy that angels would win elections."

Bruce Fein

"Governments have ever been known to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolize it more and more."

Francisco Ferrer, (1857-1909) Source: The Modern School

"I look upon an increase of the power of the State with the greatest fear, because although while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress. We know of so many cases where men have adopted trusteeship, but none where the State has really lived for the poor."

Mahatma Gandi
"Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves."

 Hugo Grotius
 
"The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason 
no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is
committed."

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 23

(Statements like this are the reason I'm an Anti-Federalist. RAB)
"[I]t is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being 
arbitrary."

Friedrich August von Hayek, Source: The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 1944), p. 71.
"There have existed, in every age and every country, two distinct orders of men - 
the lovers of freedom and the devoted advocates of power."

Robert Y. Haynes, U.S. Senator, January 21, 1830
"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves."

William Hazlitt, (1778-1830)

"Every device employed to bolster individual freedom must have as its chief purpose the impairment of the absoluteness of power. The indications are that such an impairment is
brought about not by strengthening the individual and pitting him against the possessors of power, but by distributing and diversifying power and pitting one category or unit of power against the other. Where power is one, the defeated individual, however strong and resourceful, can have no refuge and no recourse."

Eric Hoffer

"Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay."

Eric Hoffer

"Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true."

Eric Hoffer

"The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power."

Eric Hoffer
 
"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."

Eric Hoffer

"I doubt if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and for power - 
power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they 
want to retaliate."

Eric Hoffer, Source: quoted in Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey (Calvin Tompkins), 1968

"People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire 
for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall 
grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of 
a "have not" type of self."

Eric Hoffer
"The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny; 
flattery to treachery; standing armies to arbitrary government; and the glory of God to 
the temporal interest of the clergy."

David Hume
"In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down 
from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

Thomas Jefferson

"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power 
the greater it will be."

Thomas Jefferson

"What has destroyed liberty and the rights of men in every government that has ever 
existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating of all cares and powers into 
one body."

Thomas Jefferson

"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That 'all powers 
not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the 
States, are reserved to the States or to the people' (10th Amendment). To take a single 
step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to 
take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to any definition."

Thomas Jefferson, Source: letter to George Washington,15 February, 1791

"An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens."

Thomas Jefferson

"It is a misnomer to call a government republican in which a branch of the supreme power
[the judiciary] is independent of the nation."

Thomas Jefferson

"You seem...to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all Constitutional 
questions: a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the 
despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They
have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their 
corps. ...And their power (is) the more dangerous, as they are in office for life and not 
responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution 
has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the 
corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots."

Thomas Jefferson

"It is not by the consolidation, or concentration, of powers, but by their distribution 
that good government is effected."

Thomas Jefferson
"The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State."

Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987)
Source: The Ethics of Redistribution [1952] (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1990), p. 72
"Persecution, whenever it occurs, establishes only the power and cunning of the persecutor, not the truth and worth of his belief."

H. M. Kallen, (1882-1974)

"The great divide in American foreign policy thinking is between those who believe in paper and those who believe in power."

Charles Krauthammer, neocon

"American power should be used not just in the defense of American interests but for the promotion of American principles."

William Kristol, neocon do-gooder

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Milan Kundera, novelist
"Democracy, which began by liberating man politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion."

Ludwig Lewisohn (1883-1955) Source: The Modern Drama, 1915
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

Abraham Lincoln
"We are headed in this country towards a totalitarianism every bit as dangerous towards freedom as the other more forthright forms. We have our secret police, our thought control agencies, our over-powering bureaucracy. . . . The American State, like every other State, is governed by those who have a compulsion to power, to centralization, to the preservation of their gains."

Robert Ludlow, editor of the Catholic Worker, 1951
"Love is the first comforter, and where love and truth speak, the love will be felt where the truth is never perceived. Love indeed is the highest in all truth; and the pressure of a hand, a kiss, the caress of a child, will do more to save sometimes than the wisest argument, even rightly understood. Love alone is wisdom, love alone is power; and where love seems to faint it is where self has stepped between and dulled the potency of its rays."

George MacDonald
"The Truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted."

James Madison

"Every word of the Constitution ultimately decides a question between power and liberty."

James Madison

"The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

James Madison, The Federalist, No. 47

"What a perversion of the normal order of things! ... to make power the primary and central object of the social system, and Liberty but its satellite."

James Madison

"That the power to tax involves the power to destroy; that the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create; . . . are propositions not to be denied."

John Marshall
"....(I)t's easy to see why the left fears Christians. People who worship political power, who want government to direct (and thus control) all things, who have effectively deified the state, cannot imagine anyone feeling otherwise. Like Tolkein's Sauron, the thought that anyone would choose to destroy the ring of power is beyond them. And because that power is today so pervasive, they not only covet it, but cannot permit it's falling into the hands of men with whom they disagree."

Rod D. Martin, TOWARD A CHRISTIAN CULTURE, July 2002

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a 
civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either 
physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant."

John Stuart Mill
"When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a single body of the magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically.

Nor is there liberty if the power of judging is not separate from legislative power and from executive power. If it were joined to legislative power, the power over the life and liberty of the citizens would be arbitrary, for the judge would be the legislator. If it were joined to the executive power, the judge could have the force of an oppressor."

Baron Charles Secondat de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book 11
"(T)he State turns every contingency into a resource for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people. New generations appear, each temperamentally adjusted - or as I believe our American glossary now has it, 'conditioned' - to new increments of State power, and they tend to take the process of continuous accumulation as quite in order. All the State's institutional voices unite in confirming this tendency; they unite in exhibiting the progressive conversion of social power into State power as something not only quite in order, but even as wholesome and necessary for the public good."

 Albert J. Nock, "Our Enemy the State" (1935)

"You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you."

Albert J. Nock, American Mercury, March, 1939 (read full article here)
"Government by its very nature is a bully. Laws give authority to those in government and authority always corrupts, not necessarily in terms of lying, cheating and stealing but in terms of wielding power until eventually it becomes excessive. The framers of the Constitution thought they had devised a government of limited power, one that would insure liberty and the rights of individuals, one that made government the servant of the people, not its master. In the long run they failed. They had to fail because of the imperfection of man. They failed because individuals, sometimes but not always for the best and most honorable of reasons, inevitably usurp authority and power, regardless of what the Constitution says.  People who enter government service because of a desire to serve forget why they came and wind up with a desire to rule, with a firm belief that they know better than those they are supposed to serve what is good for them. Or, alternatively, they reach the point where they think the rights of others are secondary .... The question now is: How much tyranny are Americans willing to put up with?"

Lyn Nofziger, Press Secretary for President Reagan

"A movement to resist tyranny demands a leader and no leader determined to resist tyranny and to rally freedom-loving Americans has appeared anywhere on the horizon.  I also know that power corrupts and many a rebellion against tyranny, having won the victory, has merely resulted in replacing the old brand of tyranny with a new brand.  Indeed, never in history has there been a band of patriots like the Founding Fathers, men who in the name of liberty defeated a tyrant and then resisted the temptation to seize power for themselves.  The chances that such a band or such a man as George Washington can again emerge to lead a new American Revolution and build a new nation dedicated to the principles of liberty and equality as God-given rights are pretty small."

Lyn Nofziger

"British sportsman Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832) wrote, 'The three great apostles of practical atheism that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are health, wealth, and power.' America as a whole, and many Americans individually, had them all in 2000. If we had read the Bible more, we could have been reassured by Horace Greeley's statement that 'It is impossible to enslave mentally and socially a Bible-reading people.' But even though 92 percent of American households own at least one Bible and the average household owns three, a Gallup survey showed that fewer than half of Americans knew the name of the Bible's first book."

Marvin Olasky
"No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."

P.J. O'Rourke
 
"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception."

George Orwell

"Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably to the belief that the present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible."

George Orwell, James Burnham and The Managerial Revolution (1946)

"A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either."

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man [1791-1792]

"...[W]ars have been used throughout modern history to justify rapid expansion of state
power at the expense of personal liberty. We cannot remain free if we allow the endless, 
undeclared war on terror to serve as an excuse for giving up every last vestige of our 
privacy. ... Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves what kind of society we hope to leave 
our children and grandchildren. A civilized and free society would not be discussing, 
much less seriously debating, any proposal to enlist private citizens to act as federal
neighborhood snitches."

Rep. Ron Paul
"Throughout the history of the United States, war has been the primary impetus behind the 
growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents 
and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of 
tenacious popular resistance."

Bruce D. Porter, (1952- ) Professor of political science at Brigham Young University
Source: "War and the Rise of the State", 1994

"Our Declaration of Independence has been copied by emerging nations around the globe, its themes adopted in places many of us have never heard of.  Here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights. We the people declared that government is created by the people for their own convenience.  Government has no power except those voluntarily granted it by the people.  There have been revolutions before and since ours, revolutions that simply exchanged one set of rulers for another.  Ours was a philosophical revolution that changed the very concept of government."

Ronald Reagan

"The new laws passed by Congress in the name of fighting terrorism pose a greater danger to the civil liberties of American citizens than to the operations of terrorists. Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die."

Charley Reese

"Terrorists can endanger some of us, but the war on terror endangers us all.  How much more can the Constitution be diminished before it is completely replaced by arbitrary government power?"

Paul Craig Roberts

"To centralize power in the name of freedom is akin to putting a crime syndicate in charge of rooting out corruption.  It is the normal state of politics that the more centralized it is, the more damage it does.  Fast-track authority [for government-to-government trade agreements] centralizes power and is therefore part of the problem."

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

"Never underestimate the power of bad ideas. They must be refuted again and again."

Lew Rockwell

"When liberty becomes license, some form of one-man power is not far distant."

Theodore Roosevelt

"Providence hath laid bounds on the king's power, and made it fatherly and not masterly; so that if it, the power, exceed the bounds of fatherly power, and pass over to the despotical and masterly power, it may be resisted by the people....

A power contrary to justice, to peace and the good of the people, that looketh to no law as a rule, and so is unreasonable, and forbidden by the law of God and the civil law.... cannot be lawful power, and cannot constitute a lawful judge; but an absolute and unlimited power is such. How can the judge be the minister of God for good to the people (Romans 13:4) if he have such power as a king, given to him of God, to destroy and waste the people."

Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex
 
"Politics and bureaucracy are arenas of personal power that are nearly irresistible to 
mediocre persons. Mediocrities in power regard the world as unsafe as long as persons of
originality and creativity are allowed freedom."

Otto Scott, Historian
"The lust for power in dominating others inflames the heart more than any other passion."

Tacitus, Source: The Histories
"In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty."

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi
"....I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 
"It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. 
Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong."

Wendell Willkie
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