Political instability

“ When a long series of civil dissensions, of frauds upon the public, of treasons against the parties, of perjuries to principles, have mixed up men and things, blotted out the 'line between political groups, and confused all ideas, politics must become a genuine chaos. ”

“ With what delight must every well-informed friend of mankind look forward to the auspicious period, the dissolution of political government, of that brute engine, which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind, and which has mischiefs of various sorts incorporated with its substance, and no otherwise to be removed than by its utter annihilation! ”

“ Today, we are stopping, in one instance, that enabling, but we must also make sure to stop it going forward. The political stunt that brought us here today offers no great solace that it will. These stunts have consequences. We say words have consequences, and the actions today will have significant consequences. They are an attack on our democracy that undermines the core tenets of our American Government and a disrespect for the will of the people and a peaceful transition of power. ”

“ To "make political capital," as their slang phrase goes, for themselves or party, the most obvious policy of the country is disregarded, the plainest requirements of morality and common sense set aside, and the worst impulses of the people watched, waited on, and stimulated into madness. To listen to the debates in Congress, one would think the sole object of its members in coming together, was to make themselves and their country contemptible. ”

“ But if it fails, then greater than ever will be the danger—not of monarchy or imperialism, but that by a sort of dry-rot our institutions may gradually lose their vitality; that our time-honored Constitutional principles may be obliterated by abuses of power establishing themselves as precedents; that the machinery of administration may become more and more a mere instrument of ring-rule, a tool to manufacture majorities and to organize plunder; and that, in the hollow shell of republican forms, the Government will become the football of rapacious and despotic factions. ”

“ The oscillations—that is, the political agitations which result from this struggle of labor against power—now lead to a depression of the central force, which compromises the very existence of society; now, exaggerating this same force beyond measure, give birth to despotism. ”

“ The dubious and vacillating Powers frittering away their political forces, espousing every contradiction in succession, and turning in weariness from the disgusting scenes in which they will have reluctantly participated, will in all probability leave the path open for their neighbours who have steadier aims and fewer scruples. ”

“ The causes of the overthrow of the old government are foreign to our present purpose. The consequence has been the birth of this bloody and scorching despotism,—this giant, armed from his mother's womb with sweeping scimitar and consuming fire. Can such a government be fit for such a people? ”

“ The national experience is always strangely mixed. Even the successes of our own past, such as the Federal organization, contain much dubious matter, demanding the most scrupulous disentanglement. Even the worst enemies of our national integrity, such as the Southern planters, offer in some respects an edifying political example to a disinterested democracy. ”

“ Her real danger lies in the pernicious activity of her dominant political leaders who perpetuate their control by overriding local and national authority to the diminution of both public and private security. ”

“ All the dangers which threaten bureaucratic industrialism everywhere—political party influences with their capricious zigzag courses, favouritism, protection and graft, waste and indifference, small men with inflated importance in great positions, and great men with crushed wings in narrow places—all would naturally increase, and weaken the nation in the rivalry of the world. ”

“ But any government which an insurgent people attains by elections must necessarily be a leaden weight on its feet, especially in so immense an economic, political, and moral reorganization as the social revolution. ”

“ The political stunts themselves, driven by opportunism, blaze a path that can be followed by more competent challenges just as the dictatorial instincts and actions of this President can be followed by more effective would-be tyrants intent on destroying our Republic. ”

“ Given universal suffrage; a vague, blind, bitter feeling of discontent on the one side and of insecurity on the other; unscrupulous politicians who may ride into power by exciting hopes and fears; class jealousies and class antipathies; great moneyed interests working through all parties with utter selfishness; a general disgust with political methods and feeling of practical political impotence, producing indifference and recklessness on the part of the great mass of voters—and any accident may start a series of the most dangerous actions and reactions. ”

“ But it is extraordinary how much of that comment is made in a tone of hopeless dissatisfaction, how rarely it is associated with any will to change a state of affairs that so largely stultifies our national purpose. And yet the causes of our present political ineptitude are fairly manifest, and a radical and effective reconstruction is well within the wit of man. ”

“ In consequence of the progress made by public opinion, and the happy subsidence of revolutionary agitations, the excessive governing has already diminished, and the disposition to it is rapidly declining. The annoyances inflicted by the political police are fast disappearing. ”

“ If a Government's conspiring against itself were a sufficient ground for arming it with arbitrary power, no country could for a moment be safe against ministerial treachery and encroachment, against real despotism founded on pretended disaffection. Government would be in perpetual convulsions and affected hysterics, like a fine lady who wants to domineer over her credulous husband. ”

“ When the tumult and the shouting had died and the captains of industry and the kings of local politics had departed and laid their plans for the elimination of the upstart, it transpired that the upstart had by that one speech crystallized a somewhat indefinite policy of progressive radicalism into a compaign for the rescue of the State from the control of the financial and public utility magnates who had quietly taken it over from an older and far more corrupt purely political management. ”

“ Voting is done more recklessly; it is harder to arouse the people to the necessity of reforms and more difficult to carry them out; political differences are ceasing to be differences of principle, and abstract ideas are losing their power; parties are passing into the control of what in general government would be oligarchies and dictatorships. These are all evidences of political decline. ”

“ It will be represented to him that no party can live without public plunder, and that the abolition of the spoils system will lead to the downfall of the Republic. From flattery to threats, from private appeals to open demonstrations of hostility in Congress, every means will be employed to induce him to break his word. And that opposition will be directed by able leaders, experienced in all the resources of political warfare. ”

“ It has stirred up all the bitter contests of the last thirty years, and plunged the country into the bloodiest civil wars, and it will do so again unless we at last cut out and eject this prolific abomination from our political system. ”

“ The conduct of the universities, the repression of seditious writings, the establishment of a political police,—nothing was neglected in this regular crusade, undertaken by the government against the revolutionary feelings by which the heated imaginations were then inflamed. After great disturbances have taken place in a state, the sole anxiety of the government is to check any disposition to disorder, and they are excited to do so by public opinion, and by the middle classes, who entertain a dread of fresh revolutions, and with good reason. ”

“ If we cling to our national ideals it will mean the final isolation and the political abandonment of the minor groups who hope for domination of the government, either by "interests" or by radical social theories through the control of our political machinery. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What kind of power can the democratic opposition mobilize that will be sufficient to destroy the dictatorship and its vast military and police networks? The answers lie in an oft ignored understanding of political power. ”

“ As vested interests manipulated the apparatus of power and the disaffected majority agitated for some measure of political control, our government steadily drifted towards paralysis and in many cases abdication. ”

“ Unrestricted immigration, universal suffrage, rotation in office, the subjection of many offices and measures to popular vote, the parliamentary system, government by political parties—all these customs and habits into which we have fallen have arrived at failure which presages disaster. ”

“ Any one who has any experience in political matters will easily understand that for this National Party to engage in the struggle with any hope of success it must be provided with ready means, otherwise the remaining divisions will pre-occupy the field, and the country, after going through twelve years of the most cruel despotism, will fall into civil war, and thence into the most frightful state of anarchy. ”

“ Political causes are those connected with the organization of government or the actions of the governing power. In this case the dissatisfaction arises from the failure of the individual or group to secure what is believed to be a rightful share in the control of the government, or in some positive repressive or persecuting measures on the part of the governing body toward some of its citizens. Hence we may look for motives of infringed liberty, lack of freedom, or the feeling of oppression. ”

“ The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction—that, senores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future.” ”

“ At the beginning of a new campaign to undermine the dictatorship, the first more specifically political actions may be limited in scope. They should be designed in part to test and influence the mood of the population, and to prepare them for continuing struggle through noncooperation and political defiance. ”

“ All political arrangements, in that they have to bring a variety of widely-discordant interests into unity and harmony, necessarily occasion manifold collisions. From these collisions spring misproportions between men's desires and their powers; and from these, transgressions. The more active the State is, the greater is the number of these. ”

“ And, if the evils which are inseparable from the good of political liberty are to be checked, if the perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of self-restraining freedom, it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal with political as they now deal with scientific questions; ”

“ If a political system, any political system, produces any other result; if it has issue in a representation of the lowest and basest in society, or even of the general average, then it is a bad system and it must be redeemed or it will bring an end that is couched in terms of catastrophe. ”

“ There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism. ”

“ Where the lines of political division are vertical, the men of each occupation and of every social standing separating according to their vocations and principles, the result is healthy and normal. Just so far, however, as the lines are drawn horizontally, the result is unhealthy, and in the long run disastrous, for such a division means that men are pitted against one another in accordance with the blind and selfish interests of the moment. ”

“ Dear Sir,—The fundamental article of my political creed is, that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor; equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical. ”

“ Under the severe pressure of despotism the people rise in their fury, and snap their chains asunder. A republic follows; degenerating first into a rude and wild democracy; and thence into a cruel and more turbulent anarchy. ”

“ Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith? One has but to bear in mind the process of politics to realize that its path of good intentions is full of pitfalls: wire-pulling, intriguing, flattering, lying, cheating; in fact, chicanery of every description, whereby the political aspirant can achieve success. ”

“ Over the years, our political system has degenerated to the extent that it is difficult for anyone to make any headway yet keep his hands clean. ”

“ The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue. ”

“ He says that the political criminal is the victim of an attempt of a more or less despotic government to preserve its own stability. He is not necessarily guilty of an unsocial offense; he simply tries to overturn a certain political order which may itself be anti-social. ”

“ There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual impartiality should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan. ”