Algernon Sidney Quotes
There may be a hundred thousand men in an army, who are all equally free; but they only are naturally most fit to be commanders or leaders, who most excel in the virtues required for the right performance of those offices.
Sidney, Algernon. Discourses Concerning Government. Printed by J. Darby, 1698, ch. 1, sec. 10.
In Pakistan, the civilian governments were not in control of the army who would have their own polices, foreign and domestic. When the head of the Army assumed the Presidency in a coup, he approached the Prime Minister of India—the Pakistan traditional enemy—and assured him that unlike with the civilian governments, he could negotiate for the country. Ironically, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh disclosed this quotation after Pervez Musharraf was deposed and democracy and civilian government returned to Pakistan. However the Indian Prime Minister then complained that there was no one to negotiate with as the civilian elected prime minister could not speak for the army—still the major power in Pakistan.
Algernon Sidney or Sydney was an English politician and member of the middle part of the Long Parliament. A republican political theorist, colonel, and commissioner of the trial of King Charles I of England, he opposed the king's execution. Sidney was later charged with plotting against Charles II, in part based on his most famous work, Discourses Concerning Government, which was used by the prosecution as a witness at his trial. He was executed for treason. After his death, Sidney was revered as a "Whig patriot–hero and martyr".
