James Otis Quotes

Every one of the world's dictatorships can and does claim to be acting in the name of the people.

A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases.

When men are arrested without any legal basis and for political reasons, it's merely a routine, everyday occurrence in Russia, and hardly anyone has any sympathy.

It would be stupid tameness, and unaccountable folly, for whole nations to suffer one unreasonable, ambitious and cruel man, to wanton and riot in their misery.

Brutal men with unlimited power are the same all over the world.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

I can hardly sit on the bench and restrain my indignation at the tyrannous methods of the Department of Justice …. More lawless proceedings are hard to imagine.

A tyrant is a man who sacrifices a whole nation to his ideal or his ambition.

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.

If the national government falls into the hands of sufficiently unprincipled men, they can do terrible things before any one can stop them.

America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.

Security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name.

The Yanukovych regime is a mafia, which regularly threatens, imprisons, murders, or disappears political opponents as well as those whose possessions it covets.

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.

While the Governor, and the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

In more than half the nations of our world, torture certifies that the form of government is tyranny. Only tyranny, no matter how camouflaged, needs and employs torturers. Torture has no ideology.

Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.

Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.

The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.

In Russia a man is called reactionary if he objects to having his property stolen and his wife and children murdered.

The possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason.

Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power.

Irresponsible power is inconsistent with liberty, and must corrupt those who exercise it.