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| A Framer | Under every government the [last] resort of the people, is an appeal to the sword; whether to defend themselves against the open attacks of a foreign enemy, or to check the insidious encroachments of domestic foes. Whenever a people ... entrust the defence of their country to a regular, standing army, composed of mercenaries, the power of that country will remain under the direction of the most wealthy citizens. | |
| John Adams | 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 | 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. | |
| Samuel Adams | He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people. | |
| Aeschylus | For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends. | |
| Aesop | | |
| Aristotle | The three aims of the tyrant are, one, the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; two, the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not to be overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another -- and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they will not be ruled despotically, but also because they are too loyal to one another and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men -- three, the tyrant desires that all his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny if they are powerless. | |
| Richard Armey | Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision. | |
| Thurman Arnold | [The US has] developed two coordinate governing classes:
the one, called ‘business,' building cities, manufacturing
and distributing goods, and holding complete and autocratic
power over the livelihood of millions;
the other, called ‘government,' concerned with preaching and
exemplification of spiritual ideals, so caught in a mass of
theory, that when it wished to move in a practical world it
had to do so by means of a sub rosa political machine. | |
| Dave Barry | The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and time again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club. | |
| Chief Judge David L. Bazelon | My own view rests on the premise that nullification can and should serve an important function in the criminal process ... The doctrine permits the jury to bear on the criminal process a sense of fairness and particularized justice ... The drafters of legal rules cannot anticipate and take account of every case where a defendant’s conduct is “unlawful” but not blameworthy, any more than they can draw a bold line to mark the boundary between an accident and negligence. It is the jury -- as spokesmen for the community’s sense of values -- that must explore that subtle and elusive boundary. ... I do not see any reason to assume that jurors will make rampantly abusive use of their power. Trust in the jury is, after all, one of the cornerstones of our entire criminal jurisprudence, and if that trust is without foundation we must reexamine a great deal more than just the nullification doctrine. | |
| James Bovard | To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck. | |
| David Brin | It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. | |
| David Broder | Anybody that wants
the Presidency so much
that he'll spend two years
organizing and campaigning for it
is not to be trusted
with the office. | |
| Edmund Burke | No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy. | |
| Samuel Butler | The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust. | |
| Domingo Cavallo | Each peso [or dollar] is a contract between the government and the peso holder. That contract guarantees that each peso -- as a unit of value that the holder has worked hard to get -- will be worth as much tomorrow as today. If the government breaks the contract, it's breaking the law. The only role of government in the economy should be to guarantee the integrity of market transactions. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress. | |
| Joseph H. Choate | The Act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communistic in its purposes and tendencies, and is defended here upon principles as communistic, socialistic - what shall I call them - populistic as ever have been
addressed to any political assembly in the world. | |
| Georges Clemenceau | War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men. | |
| Bill Clinton | Every time Bush talks about trust it makes chills run up and down my spine. The way he has trampled on the truth is a travesty of the American political system. | |
| Bill Clinton | The other thing we have to do is to take seriously the role in this problem of...older men who prey on underage women...There are consequences to decisions and...one way or the other, people always wind up being held accountable. | |
| Bill Clinton | We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans... | |
| Charles Caleb Colton | To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it. | |
| Confucius | The superior man cannot be known in little matters, but he may be entrusted with great concerns. The small man may not be entrusted with great concerns, but he may be known in little matters. | |
| Pierre Corneille | Do your duty, and leave the rest to heaven. | |
| Tench Coxe | The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people. | |
| Tench Coxe | Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people. | |
| Frank Dane | Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business. | |
| Charles Darwin | To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. | |
| Graceanne A. Decandido | If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas. | |
| Demosthenes | There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust. | |
| Demosthenes | There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm. | |
| John G. Diefenbaker | Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. | |
| Benjamin Disraeli | I repeat... that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that, from the people, and for the people, all springs, and all must exist. | |
| Frederick Douglass | I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class. | |
| John Dryden | We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what they help distribute to the public; by which means a falsehood once received from a famed writer becomes traditional to posterity. | |
| Albert Einstein | The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses. | |
| Bergan Evans | The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. | |
| Justice Stephen J. Field | Here I close my opinion. I could not say less in view of
questions of such gravity that go down to the very foundations of the government. If the
provisions of the Constitution can be set aside by an Act of Congress, where is the course
of usurpation to end? The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but
the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will
become a war of the poor against the rich; a war growing in intensity and bitterness. | |
| Alan Dean Foster | Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | No man's life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Trusting too much to others' care is the ruin of many; for, as the almanac says, in the affairs of this world men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it; but a man's own care is profitable; for, saith Poor Dick, learning is to the studious, and riches to the careful, as well as power to the bold, and Heaven to the virtuous. | |
| Milton Friedman | The power to determine the quantity of money... is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank. | |
| James A. Garfield | Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let every one know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it. | |
| The Pennsylvania Gazette | Since the federal constitution has removed all danger of our having a paper tender, our trade is advanced fifty percent. Our monied people can trust their cash abroad, and have brought their coin into circulation. | |
| A. Bartlett Giamatti | Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well. | |
| Jo Godwin | A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. | |
| Baltasar Gracian | The sole advantage of power is that you can do more good. | |
| Alan Greenspan | Regulation -- which is based on force and fear -- undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory. | |
| Lt. Col. James Bo Gritz (Ret) | A spider web of 'patriots for profit', operating from the highest positions of special trust and confidence, have successfully circumvented our constitutional system in pursuit of a New World Order. | |
| Alexander Haig | That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to society itself. | |
| Larry Hardiman | The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites.' | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | Love your country, but never trust its government. | |
| Patrick Henry | Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands? | |
| Patrick Henry | Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.... O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! | |
| Nat Hentoff | Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices – taking advantage of our freedom of speech – who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do. | |
| Adolf Hitler | Without law and order our nation cannot survive. | |
| 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 | It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable. | |
| Eric Hoffer | When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our lives. | |
| Karen Horney | We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression. | |
| Aldous Huxley | Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty. | |
| I Ching | Mistrust the people and they become untrustworthy. | |
| Henrik Ibsen | The great secret of power is never to will to do more than you can accomplish. | |
| William Ralph Inge | A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to
one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly
the functions in which he is competent ...\\
- To let the National Government be entrusted with the defense of the
nation, and its foreign and federal relations ...\\
- The State Governments with the Civil Rights, Laws, Police and
administration of what concerns the State generally.\\
- The Counties with the local concerns, and each ward direct the interests
within itself.\\
It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great
national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the
administration of everyman's farm by himself, by placing under everyone
what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. | |