Authority Abuse Quotes

Whenever the law gets its hands on you, those who use the law to their own advantage will also turn it against you. Don't put your trust in the laws of men, Alvin. They were designed by strong men to improve their power over weaker ones.

He who has the greatest power put into his hands will only become the more impatient of any restraint in the use of it.

In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.

If you have to abuse your power, you're probably in the process of losing it.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

Tyranny, Is far the worst of treasons. Dost thou deem None rebels except subjects? The prince who Neglects or violates his trust is more A brigand than the robber-chief.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it.

The Law! It is the arch-crime of the centuries. The path of Man is soaked with the blood it has shed. Can this great criminal determine Right? Is a revolutionist to respect such a travesty? It would mean the perpetuation of human slavery.

What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.

Nothing corrupts a man so much as being an arm of the law and making men suffer.

In all ages hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns on the heads of thieves, called kings.

Get up in one of our industrial centers today and say that two and two make four, and if there is any financial interest concerned in maintaining that two and two make five, the police will bash your head in.

... all of our human experience shows that no one with absolute power can be trusted to give it up even in part.

I would love to do the whole 'Anonymous General Manager' storyline again. The way it was supposed to turn out was that I was supposed to be this almost mob-boss style character with this Napoleon complex, throwing his power around while running Raw. Obviously things didn't work out that way.

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

If the great servants of the public forget their duty, betray their trust and sell their country, or make war against the most valuable rights and privileges of the people; reason and justice require that they should be discarded, and others appointed in their room, without any regard to formal resignations of their forfeited power.

Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty - their power and privilege - to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

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