Charles James Quotes

That which killed my late master, & so many of his predecessors. The responsibility of arbitrary power.

The possession of unlimited power corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

Dictators cause the world's worst problems: all the collapsed states, and all the devastated economies. All the vapid cases of corruption, grand theft, and naked plunder of the treasury are caused by dictators, leaving in their wake trails of wanton destruction, horrendous carnage and human debris.

The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

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.

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.

We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men. But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

Yes, citizens, Iturbide was a traitor, a hypocrite and an impious man who destroyed the assembly in which the people had deposited their sovereignty in order to appropriate it all to himself

Powerlessness corrupts: absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely

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.

Power tends to corrupt if you're there too long.

Those who exercise power always arrange matters so as to give their tyranny the appearance of justice.

You know, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"? It's the same with powerlessness. Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.

Overly concentrated power, whether in public, private or even in civic hands is an invitation to abuse.

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

Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.

Other offences, even the greatest, are the violation of one law: despotism is the violation of all.

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