Gerrard Winstanley Quotes

The scum of the People are most Tyrannical when they get the Power, and treat their Betters with the greatest Insolence.

What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.

What distinguishes Germany from America and Western Europe is control by titled land-holders, the lack of civil liberty and free institutions, and the cowardliness of the middle class

And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the whim of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin of commonwealths and the subversion of the state.

He who has the greatest power put into his hands will only become the more impatient of any restraint in the use of it.

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.

Freedom can be destroyed, not just by its retraction, but also by its abuse.

I'm scared of people with power making the decision.

Let your observations and comparisons produce in your mind an abhorrence of domination and power, the parent of slavery, ignorance, and barbarism, which places man upon a level with his fellow tenants of the woods.

Under dictatorship, the people in prison are always superior to the people who put them there.

The sin of all time has been the exercise of assumed powers. This is the essence of tyranny.

Power wears out those who do not have it.

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race

The tyrant claims freedom to kill freedom, and yet keep it for himself.

It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are yourself the slave-driver.

I would not be beholden to a tyrant, for his acts of tyranny. For it is but usurpation in him to save, as their rightful lord, the lives of men over whom he has no title to reign.

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

As it is the nature of a kite to devour little birds, so it is the nature of some minds to insult and tyrannize over little people; this being the means which they use to recompense themselves for their extreme servility and condescension to their superiors; for nothing can be more reasonable than that slaves and flatterers should exact the same taxes on all below them which they themselves pay to all above them.

The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.