Francis Lieber Quotes

To assume all the powers is not good for anybody. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All those experiments have a bad ending.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

If you give human beings power over others, their natural tendency is to be fascists.

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

At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power..

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.

The State acquires power... and because of its insatiable lust for power it is incapable of giving up any of it. The State never abdicates.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

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

Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may.

It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.

They (who) seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers … call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.

In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and whenever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.

One Hundred and Seventy Three Despots would surely be as oppressive as one.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

When the people are sheep, the government is always a wolf.

To trample democracy with one’s feet and to give power to a single man over almost eighty million people is so terrible that one can very probably tremble over the events which will come here.

Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind

… we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

Politics without responsibility IS fascism.

With the suppression of all political parties, the bases were laid for the totalitarian state.

Authoritarianism doesn't fall on a nation like a book falling from a shelf and striking you in the head. It rolls in like a slow tide.

Mobutu does not think he is God.

Although tyranny...may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.

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.