Centralized Authority Quotes

… something with monarchical power in it would be most effectual for the settlement of the nation

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible.

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it. Dealing with Congress is a matter of give and take. The president doesn't get everything he wants, the Congress doesn't get everything they want. But we're finding good common ground.

There’s a mayor and a council and judges—a hundred men to deal with … and you can’t do business with a lot of officials, who check and cross one another and who come and go …. A business man wants to do business with one man.

The Chinese state is constructed in an entirely different way from western states. Unlike European states, for over a millennium the Chinese state has not been obliged to compete for power with rivals such as the church, the aristocracy or merchants.

A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.

Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.

Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power -- power sufficient to interfere with property.

The European Union, which is not directly responsible to voters, provides an irresistible opportunity for European elites to seize power in order to impose their own vision on a newly socially regimented Europe.

Nobody really likes large-scale organizations; nobody likes to take orders from a superior who takes orders from a superior who takes orders.

Among the colonists were spies who took note of the conversations and the schemes of the natives and supplied the information to the governors, who sent it to Cuzco without delay, to be submitted to the Inca. In this way all was made secure.

An authoritarian style of rule is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it.

What comes after the revolution is inevitably bureaucracy. Whoever wins the revolution builds a bureaucracy.

We have seen a central government taking more and more control over public education, over communications, over transportation, over every detail of our daily lives.

It’s a big country; it needs a lot of regulation.

You can think of all the things a Congress or a legislature does, and then you kind of overshadow that with the fact that a few people are going to make those decisions.

For years, American officials visiting China marvelled at how Chinese leaders could push through infrastructure projects and sweeping legislative changes without the complications of opposition and the niceties of voting.

A problem is that if all of us are collectively responsible for a big world goal, then no single agency or politician is held accountable if the goal is not met. Collective responsibility for world goals works about as well as collective farms in agriculture, and for the same reason.

A totalitarian state will harmonize in Spain the operation of all the capabilities and energy in the country

The state reserves the right to be the sole interpreter of the needs of society.

Socialism and interventionism. Both have in common the goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state.

The Seventeenth Amendment serves not the public's interest but the interests of the governing masterminds and their disciples. Its early proponents advanced it not because they championed 'democracy' or the individual, but because they knew it would be one of several important mechanisms for empowering the federal government and unraveling constitutional republicanism.

Now we’re going to get big government.

Government tends to believe in top-down solutions, and government fears of bottom-up solutions.