William Jennings Bryan Quotes

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.

The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.

And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.

Authority figures are so irritating. Because they always tell you to do things for reasons that aren't very good. That sums up what authority is about for me.

Their authority over their slaves renders them vain and imperious.

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.

… so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

The natural course of power is to make the many slaves to the few.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

War and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.

I think the greatest lesson that power has to teach us is, once you've had it, once you are a part of it, you're never free.

People who are divided are easier to control.

I think it's a dangerous thing for anyone to have power over other people.

Fear must rule in a despotism.

The average bloke . . . hates and fears all freedom, not only for others but for himself, and stamps it out wherever possible.

Power wears out those who do not have it.

Authority is quite degrading.

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.

He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man ... or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.

Conquerors never, never conquer a nation to bring freedom. They brought control.

What you're saying is that 'I, the superior elite, will take care of you.' Why? Because, you see, that superior, elite group needs to feel superior and elite. And they can't be superior and elite unless you have a whole lot of people down there groveling around. So you keep them down there by feeding them.