Detaining power

“ In order that I may give different things different names, I call him who usurps the royal authority a tyrant, and him who usurps the sovereign power a despot. The tyrant is he who thrusts himself in contrary to the laws to govern in accordance with the laws; the despot is he who sets himself above the laws themselves. ”

“ Every power, whether legitimate or illegitimate, must defend itself when it is attacked; but, strange to say, while the people is heroic when it triumphs over the nobility, the authorities are murderers when they oppose the people! ”

“ We may be, in my opinion, my lords, censured as traitors to our trust, and enemies to our country, if we permit any vice to prevail, when it is in our power to suppress it. We may be cursed, with justice, by posterity, as the abettors of that debauchery by which poverty and disease shall be entailed upon them, contemned in the present as the flatterers of those appetites which we ought to regulate, and insulted by that populace whom we dare not oppose. ”

“ How can it abstain from promoting a complete and despotic neutralization of power, since that is the natural consequence of systematic usurpation once commenced? — Such is the power we have to struggle against; a power aspiring, grasping, unscrupulous, consolidated and despotic by nature. ”

“ Tyranny or oppression is not in being subjected to authority, but in being subjected to usurped authority—to a power that has no right to command, or that commands what exceeds its right or its authority. ”

“ Claim leads to claim, and power advances power;
Till conquest unresisted ceased to please,
And rights, submitted, left him none to seize.
At length his sovereign frowns—the train of state
Mark the keen glance, and watch the sign to hate.
Where'er he turns, he meets a stranger's eye,
His suppliants scorn him, and his followers fly ”

“ The injustice and iniquity of such acts, in general, constitute an irresistible argument against the existence of the power. In a free government it would be intolerable; and in the hands of a reigning faction, it might be, and probably would be, abused to the ruin and death of the most virtuous citizens. ”

“ It is "bringing despotism home to every man's door." It involves the greatest deliberateness and desperation of iniquity, both with law and without law, which it is possible for power to perpetrate against weakness. ”

“ At least this much was gained, that the one who abused power must first secure it from those whom he proposed to abuse, and must later exercise it unrestrained to the detriment of those from whom the power was derived and in whom it still resided. ”

“ But now, after supineness had allowed it to amass supreme and despotic power, and fortify itself by every means of defence, the antagonism of the people began to be energetically manifested. It is the fate of despotism of every form, when it has developed the full strength of its all-blasting power, to awaken another power destined to trample it in the dust. ”

“ All that is said amounts to this, that when ever men in power to evert and subvert all the ends of government, and intrude themselves upon it, and abuse it, to the hurt of the commonwealth, and the destruction of that for which government was appointed; they are then tyrants, and cease to be magistrates. ”

“ They would govern men against their will, but in that government they would be discharged from the exercise of vigilance, providence, and fortitude: and, therefore, that they may sleep on their watch, they consent to take some one division of the society into partnership of the tyranny over the rest. But let government, in what form it may be, comprehend the whole in its justice, and restrain the suspicious by its vigilance; let it keep watch and ward; let it discover by its sagacity, and punish by its firmness, all delinquency against its power, whenever delinquency exists in the overt acts ”

“ That a power to destroy, if wielded by a different hand, is hostile to, and incompatible with these powers to create and to preserve. 3d. That where this repugnancy exists, that authority which is supreme must control, not yield to that over which it is supreme. ”

“ They say power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And there can be no more absolute power than the twenty-three words that can free a man of any jail or give him anything he wants. Larry was my friend. ”

“ As fast as they closed on one victim, they opened to receive another. At a certain stage of all despotic governments, the small few in power live mainly for two reasons—to amuse themselves and to revenge themselves. ”

“ A litigious spirit became so universal that all authority was openly derided, crimes of every description being so common as to force most respectable men to withdraw from public affairs and leave a bare rump of desperadoes in power. ”

“ Since, by the partial administration of our laws, innocence, when power was armed against it, had nothing better to hope for than guilt, what man of true courage would fail to set these laws at defiance, and, if he must suffer by their injustice, at least take care that he had first shown his contempt of their yoke? ”

“ What does it avail to expose the absurd contrivance, or pernicious tendency of measures, if the man, who advises or executes, shall be suffered not only to escape with impunity, but even to preserve his power, and insult us with the favour of his Sovereign. ”

“ Above all that generation deeply feared and bitterly abhorred the existence of arbitrary, unchecked power in the hands of any government official, particularly when it came to punishing alleged offenses against the state. ”

“ If an innocent, unoffending, and highly beneficial institution could be thus easily destroyed by the power of one man, where would be the difficulty of crushing it, if it had given any real cause for just animadversion? ”

“ It admits them to political power, not as, under better institutions, they would be admitted to power, erect, independent, unsullied; but by means which corrupt the virtue of many, and in some degree diminish the authority of all. Could any system be devised, better fitted to pervert the principles and break the spirit of men formed to be the glory of their country? ”

“ Let ignorance, corruption, and fanaticism predominate, and the fair fabric of our freedom, reared by the valour, and cemented by the blood of the revolutionary patriots, will tremble, totter, and fall. Chaos will mount the car of discord, sound the dread clarion of death, and LIBERTY will expire amidst the smoking ruins of her own citadel. Remember that “knowledge is power,” wealth “the sinews of power,” and that honesty, virtue, and integrity are the regulators of them both. Remember that intrigue, fanaticism, and faction may prostrate, at one bold stroke, the fairest, noblest work of years. ”

“ Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where law ends, tyranny begins! ”

“ It is not enough that they have secured the whole power of the state in their hands,—that they carry every measure they please without the chance of an effectual opposition to it: but a word uttered against it is torture to their ears,—a thought that questions their wanton exercise of the royal prerogative rankles in their breasts like poison. ”

“ The favourite Subject of its Clamours will be the Misconduct of Those who govern. And in a Country where Liberty is justly ranked among the greatest national Blessings, the most plausible Pretence of Faction will be, "to load the executive Power with the Charge of Despotism." ”

“ To comply with the command seemed madness in men who were conscious that their proceedings had already amounted to high treason;—but to refuse obedience, and thus set at defiance a power to which they were as yet unprepared to oppose any effectual resistance, seemed equally desperate. ”

“ To attack the state immediately is to be guilty either of rebellion or high treason. Rebellion is to attempt to raise, or actually to raise, a power in hostility to the power of the state, and to resist therewith that power of the state. ”

“ They detest the republic, which has shorn them of their splendor, and do everything in their power (socially and diplomatically their power is still great) to interfere with and frustrate the plans of the government. ”

“ They have taken the law into their own hands and have thought to punish you themselves. They have done wrong, they have done foolishly. Who can punish you? You have power above the law. Your interests are above the courts of the land. ”

“ However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; ”

“ And the world is witnessing in astonishment the spectacle offered by these bandits who, illegally holding the state power, arbitrarily decide the fortunes of a whole people after having allured them with fallacious promises, betraying them before the enemy. ”

“ Give them clearly to understand that your power rests, not as they have hitherto imagined, on their rational convictions, or on their habitual veneration, or on your own great property, but on a system fertile of political evils, fertile also of low iniquities of which ordinary justice take cognisance. ”

“ A demoralization of public sentiment more than ever fatal to public justice and eventually to public order and peace; unscrupulous struggles for the possession of power to be used in the exploitation of opportunities without regard to the rights of the defeated—that is, alternating despotisms. ”

“ These very men, though chosen for such a work, as the digesting a body of laws for the government of a free state, did immediately usurp arbitrary power, ran into all the forms of it, had their guards and spies after the practice of the tyrants of those ages, affected kingly state, destroyed the nobles, and oppressed the people ”

“ Sovereigns may send their opposers to dungeons; they may clear out a senate-house with soldiers; they may enlist armies of spies; they may hang scores of the disaffected in chains at every cross road; but what power shall stand in that 136frightful time when rebellion hath become a less evil than endurance? Who shall dissolve that terrible tribunal, which, in the hearts of the oppressed, denounces against the oppressor the doom of its wild justice? Who shall repeal the law of self-defence? What arms or discipline shall resist the strength of famine and despair? ”

“ As previously discussed, the dictators' ability to threaten or apply sanctions—punishments against the restive, disobedient, and noncooperative sections of the population—is a central source of the power of dictators. ”

“ Is any rule more plain than this, that whoever voluntarily gives to another irresistible power over human beings is bound to take order that such power shall not be barbarously abused? But we beg pardon of our readers for arguing a point so clear. ”

“ If we had the power to destroy you, we would do it; and we are afraid that if you are let alone, you will have the power to destroy us and will do as we would under like circumstances." If this people had that power to-day, they would not infringe in the least upon the rights of any person ”

“ At the period when our authority should have been most concealed, it has been brought most in view; and by a progression of violent measures, every one of which has increased distress, we have given the world reason to conclude, that we are acquainted with no other method of governing than by force.—What a shocking mistake!—If our object is power, we should have known better how to use it; and our rulers should have considered, that freemen will always revolt at the sight of a naked sword ”

“ These were the weapons by which his power became annihilated, and which, in the end, will be the destruction of all potentates who presume to follow his fallacious plan of forming individuals to a system instead of accommodating systems to individuals. ”

“ It will be upon us, it will be upon us, if, failing to maintain this unseasonable and ill-judged declaration, a sterner despotism, maintained by military power, shall be established over our posterity, when we ourselves, given up by an exhausted, a harassed, a misled people, shall have expiated our rashness and atoned for our presumption on the scaffold. ”

“ That power which is obliged, and appointed to command and rule justly and religiously, for the good of the people, and is only set over them on these conditions, and for that end, cannot ty them to subjection without resistance, when the power is abused to the destruction of laws, religion and people ”

“ The answer to these questions is, that only those who have the will and the power to shoot down their fellow men, are the real rulers in this, as in all other (so-called) civilized countries; for by no others will civilized men be robbed, or enslaved. ”

“ There is, however, a confusion worse confounded, wherever an unauthorized power comes in, and usurps the power and authority of that which ought to be recognized—an unseen hand, that breaks in pieces, but yet shields the person who uses it. ”