Benjamin Harrison Quotes
Honorable party service will certainly not be esteemed by me a disqualification for public office, but it will in no case be allowed to serve as a shield of official negligence, incompetency, or delinquency.
Benjamin Harrison, 1833-1901, 23rd President of the United States (Republican, IN), Inaugural Address, March 4, 1889
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This is an important quotation because it was believed by most of the Founding Fathers and the American public until relatively recently. Presidential candidates would not think of publicly campaigning. The view was that anyone who was ambitious for power and authority should not be trusted with it. The idea was first stated by Plato and has been a major view of Western politics since. Many still believe it, but no one has come up with a practical alternative in a large jurisdiction where there is no way to know about the possible candidates without their initiative. Earlier American presidential candidates, although they did not campaign as we know it, got associates to do their campaigning for them. At Presidential nominating conventions, candidates would not even attend. Abraham Lincoln for example never attended the convention at which he got nominated, but he had associates lining up delagates and he was managing their efforts behind the scenes.
Communist Chine, faced with massive corruption by local Communist Party officials and an ever more knowing and angry public, had created and given enforcement teeth to a national anti-corruption program.
It is a moral crime about which voters do not seem to care much.
Ironically, according to Plato and other political philosophers, one of the important qualifications for a leader is that he doesn’t believe that he is ready at the moment. In that sense Christie burnished his star. However, few politicians ever express any public doubt regarding their experience and qualifications.
The judgment of future generations is usually quite different from that of the contemporary generation.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
See Charles James Fox, John Milton, Jeremy Bentham, George Mason, Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson for similar expressions of this idea.
Pardee was out of office at the time he made this statement.
Benjamin Harrison was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 23rd president of the United States from 1889 to 1893. He was a grandson of the ninth president, William Henry Harrison, and a great-grandson of Benjamin Harrison V, a founding father who signed the United States Declaration of Independence.
