William O. Douglas Quotes

Politicians as a class are dangerous, that people who are seeking power over us are not, by definition, our friends.

Whoever is new to power is always harsh.

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

This administration seems intent on accumulating unchecked power.

Feelings of marginalization and cries of separation are symptomatic of countries where rulers find power sweet and intoxicating, where power is coveted, and when acquired, painstakingly guarded.

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

Enlightened despots are mythical creatures; real despots seem more interested in stealing money or installing their sons after them.

The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

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

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

I think that many people in history who had power were bumped off because they had power.

And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.

History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.

Dictators are allergic to reform, and they are cunning survivors. They will do whatever it takes to preserve their power and wealth, no matter how much blood ends up on their hands. They are master deceivers and talented manipulators who cannot be trusted to change.

A vile and overbearing temper becomes sometimes, in one long accustomed to the exercise of power, unendurable to those who are subject to its humors.

The scum of the People are most Tyrannical when they get the Power, and treat their Betters with the greatest Insolence.

Democratic institutions are based on a reality of human nature: that those with power, however benign or even noble their intentions, will do what they can to keep it.

We did not find it difficult to deal with Bush and his administration, because it is similar to regimes in our countries - both types include many who are full of arrogance and greed.

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

The spirit of moderation in a state of overbearing power is a phenomenon which has not yet appeared, and which no wise man will expect ever to see.

Most governments are designed for the purposes of oppression and personal ambition.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations perverted it into tyranny.

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