Charles James Fox Quotes

I never did begin the war with the two Houses of Parliament... They began war upon me... if anybody will look at the dates of what happened... they will see clearly that they began these unhappy troubles, not I... therefore I tell you I am the martyr of the people.

The main reason for the armed resistance is the American military presence.

I beheld absolutism in all its power; and I felt encouraged to enter into a struggle against Augustin I.

In Prussia it is only kings who make revolutions.

The royal confessor was ex officio a member of the Council of State, and under a weak monarch his influence was almost unbounded.

When you read history you that kings who have come to the end of their tether, as a rule, would suffer death rather than give up part of their power.

When the people rule, they must be rendered happy, or they will overturn the state.

Monarchy is an outrage which even the blind of an entire people cannot justify... all men hold from nature the secret mission to destroy wherever it my be found. No man can reign innocently. The folly is too evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. Do kings themselves treat otherwise those who seek to usurp their authority?

If you're going to take a shot at the king. You know, you'd better kill him.

Princes rule the people, and their own passions rule Princes; but Providence can over-rule the whole, and draw the instruments of his inscrutable purposes from the vices, no less than the virtues of Kings.

O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone.

Those who disagree with the dictator's plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms.

....there is no end to observations on the difference between the measures likely to be pursued by a minister backed by a standing army, and those of a court awed by the fear of an armed people.

You can have a strong government and a weak people, or strong people and weak government, but you cannot have both.

People who don't believe in government are likely to defy our government.

History teaches us that nobody can prevent a resistance group from arming when it has the support of the people.

What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials.

At the meeting I argued that the state had given us no alternative to violence. I said it was wrong and immoral to subject our people to armed attacks by the state without offering them some kind of alternative. I mentioned again that people on their own had taken up arms. Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we saved lives by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people? If we did not take the lead now, I said, we would soon be latecomers and followers to a movement we did not control.

Away with your president! We shall have a king... the army will salute him as monarch; your militia will leave you and assist in making him king and fight against you. And what have you to oppose this force? What will then become of you and your rights?

Even if they're functioning out of ignorance, they are still participating and must be suppressed. In China, even one million people can be considered a small sum.

He hated games they made the world look too simple. Chess, in particular, had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the king lounged about doing nothing. If only the pawns would've united ... the whole board could've been a republic in about a dozen moves.

Kings and magistrates are invested with no more power than the people entrust to them.

Decades of indoctrination, manipulation, censorship and KGB excursions haven't altered this fact: People want a piece of their own little Something-or-Other, and, if they don't get it, have a tendency to initiate counterrevolution.

I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.