Timothy Thomas Fortune Quotes

A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible classes.

Americans have always understood the danger of mobs. They are always dangerous; they are always demonic.

Lynch mobs are democracies.

This spirit of mob-law is becoming as great an evil as a servile war.

Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.

I want to kill the president because I no like the capitalists. I have the gun in my hand, I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists.

Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us.

This demonstration of power, indifferent to the law, is highly dangerous.

The mob is the mother of tyrants.

Let me completely condemn these sickening scenes; scenes of looting, scenes of vandalism, scenes of thieving, scenes of people attacking police, of people even attacking firefighters. This is criminality pure and simple and it has to be confronted.

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

The whole country is one vast insane asylum and they're letting the worst patients run the place.

Our supreme governors, the mob.

Riot is the voice of the unheard.

We paid a big price for not stopping it -- that is the looting and the security -- because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness. We never had enough troops on the ground

Nor should we listen to those who say "The voice of the people is the voice of God," for the turbulence of the mob is always close to insanity.

Provoking us into quarrels and violations of the peace is one of the most common methods used … to destroy public sympathy and defeat our cause.

A democratic society cannot tolerate mob rule.

Everybody created his own justice and administered it for himself…. It was justice administered directly by the people in the complete absence of regular judicial bodies.

I wish that the television would show the long shot. They show you an angry mob violently protesting. But if you look at a long shot, you see that it is 10 idiots in a parking lot.

The Roman republic was indeed never finished. For the caprice of the multitude was left to operate at random. So that every popular demagogue had it in his power to spirit up the multitude to whatever pitch of madness might suit his ambitious, or interested views

The masses are principally to be feared because they fly out ever and anon into violence; and from plundering they proceed to the flat levelling of estates.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creatures of climate … neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the non-slaveholding states…. Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order

Let us not be carried away by the undisguised agitations of leaders who virtually asked people to take the law into their own hands.