Concentrated Power Quotes

All the power of the government will be directed towards the Rockefeller Trust.

No merely legislative body could control a single, concentrated Executive ….

Overly concentrated power, whether in public, private or even in civic hands is an invitation to abuse.

Regulation has crept up on us steadily…. The most alarming feature of this concentration of power in the Federal government is the creation of omnipotent commissions to exercise it. The new fields of Federal control are administered by small Boards or executive commissions, usually appointed by the President and responsible to no one but the President. They are part of the Executive Department. But their function is not executive only. They have two additional functions: one is legislative, the other is judicial. These commissions write the rules which make the laws effective. Then they administer the rules; and when the rules are violated, they it in judgment on the violations.

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

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

The first and most important rule to observe...is to use our entire forces with the utmost energy. The second rule is to concentrate our power as much as possible against that section where the chief blows are to be delivered and to incur disadvantages elsewhere, so that our chances of success may increase at the decisive point. The third rule is never to waste time. Finally, the fourth rule is to follow up our successes with the utmost energy. Only pursuit of the beaten enemy gives the fruits of victory.

There has been so much power concentrated. There is no leash on that power anymore and Americans face the situation that this power is getting momentum with each passing year with each presidency.

Money is power, and in that government which pays all the public officers of the states will all political power be substantially concentrated.

As civilisation advances, the deities lessen in number, the divine powers become concentrated more and more in one Being, and God rules over the whole earth, maketh the clouds his chariot, and reigns above the waterfloods as a king.

Aristocracy: A combination of many powerful men, for the purpose of maintaining their own particular interests. It is consequently a concentration of all the most effective parts of a community for a given end, hence its energy, efficiency and success.

Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active; it is concentrated strength.

A power has arisen up in the Government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.

Liberty is a word which, according as it is used, comprehends the most good and the most evil of any in the world. Justly understood it is sacred next to those which we appropriate in divine adoration; but in the mouths of some it means anything, which enervate a necessary government; excite a jealousy of the rulers who are our own choice, and keep society in confusion for want of a power sufficiently concentered to promote good.

Steve Bannon is clearly somebody who has studied not-normal politics and the Constitution and the Electoral College. He is somebody who has studied Hitler and Lenin and a lot of people who have seized power and unleashed blitzkriegs from above and created tiny cabals of power concentrated in a tiny group at the top. That's what authoritarians do. It's right out of the playbook.

Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.

The more centralized the power, the less compromises need to be made in architecture.

Better to rely on one powerful king than on many little princes.

The strength of the people is effective only if it is concentrated; it evaporates and is lost when it is dispersed, just as gunpowder scattered on the ground ignites only grain by grain.

But that's the whole point of corporatism: to try and remove the public from making decisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena, to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run —which include production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything—are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly concentrated private power. In effect, tyranny unaccountable to the public.

Is anyone really surprised that Warren, who is the ultimate embodiment of concentrated decision-making power, picked somebody [Bill and Melinda Gates] who he thinks is like him in many important ways? It was a noble and sensible decision.

From the aspect of energy, renewed by radio-active phenomena, material corpuscles may now be treated as transient reservoirs of concentrated power. Though never found in a state of purity, but always more or less granulated (even in light) energy nowadays represents for science the most primitive form of universal stuff.

Populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower workaday Americans so they can control their own economic and political destinies. This approach distinguishes the movement from classic liberalism, which seeks to live in harmony with concentrated corporate power by trying to regulate excesses.

The clinical definition of "fascism" is when private concentrated economic power takes government away from the people, turns government into a guarantor, a subsidizer, a covering of corporate power.

Democracy doesn't mean much if people have to confront concentrated systems of economic power as isolated individuals. Democracy means something if people can organize to gain information, to have thoughts for that matter, to make plans, to enter into the political system in some active way, to put forth programs and so on. If organizations of that kind exist, then democracy can exist too. Otherwise it's a matter of pushing a lever every couple of years; it's like having the choice between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola.