John Adams Quotes

The shortest way to ruin a country is to give power to demogogues.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations perverted it into tyranny.

Democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses têtes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power, they are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people

Mobutu does not think he is God.

There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.

With people in high office, the old - you go into the extreme, which is absolute power and absolute power corrupts.

Government has within it a tendency to abuse its powers.

I'm anything but skittish about government, but I must say this administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous.

President Maliki: The appetite has grown with the eating. He has become a real dictator.

Overly concentrated power, whether in public, private or even in civic hands is an invitation to abuse.

Britain is a parliamentary democracy. Power rests in Parliament, in the House of Commons, and the government - the executive - has to seek the consent of MPs for its legislation.

A parliamentary democracy that has developed its delicate balances over hundreds of years will not give up its sovereign rights.

I am in favour of a dictatorship.

However [political parties] 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, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

The continuation of authority has frequently proved the undoing of democratic governments. Repeated elections are essential to the system of popular governments, because there is nothing so dangerous as to suffer power to be vested for a long time in one citizen. The people become accustomed to obeying him, and he becomes accustomed to commanding, hence the origin of usurpation and tyranny.

Where everyman is participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year but everyday, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.

What worries me most about Trump, other than all of the other crazy things, is that I believe that he wants power and I believe from my point of view that power corrupts, and that the whole purpose of our founding fathers and America was to contain power.

The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.

Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner

The shortest way to change a radical into a conservative, a liberal into a tyrant, a man into a beast, is to give him power over his fellows.

The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping-master in a slave plantation.

If we are willing to concede the President dictatorial authority where we happen to agree with him, as liberals have tended to do over the years, we will have little chance of tying his hands when we do not....You will see why many of us in the Congress understand how Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his creation ran amok.

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.

If people cannot limit government they will not for long be free.

Tyranny knows no restraint of appetite.