Excessive Authority Quotes

The Alien & Sedition Acts are a nullity as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.

The President seems to extend executive privilege way out past the atmosphere. What he says is executive privilege is nothing but executive poppycock.

When you give the government an inch, they take a mile.

The World Is Too Much Governed

Power, carried to extremes, is always liable to reaction.

When there are too many policemen, there can be no liberty. When there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace. When there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice.

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.

We repose an unwise confidence in any government, or in any men, when we invest them officially with too much, or an unnecessary quantity of, discretionary power.

Unlimited power is worse for the average person than unlimited alcohol; and the resulting intoxication is more damaging for others. Very few have not deteriorated when given absolute dominion. It is worse for the governor than for the governed.

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.

It is wrong to take an 18-year-old boy or girl and arm them with machine guns and make them the almighty king of some little Arab village. No young man, and no old man either, should have so much power over the life and death of so many helpless individuals. It is corrupting. It sometimes provokes desperate, savage and indiscriminate violence among the occupied.

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

When extraordinary power and extraordinary pay are allotted to any individual in a government, he becomes the center, round which every kind of corruption generates and forms.

And I think we as a people need to stop being disingenuous about what the Constitution provides for. It does not provide for this all-encompassing power that we've seen exercised over the last several decades. It's what's gotten us into this bankrupt position.

Immoderate power, like other intemperance, leaves the progeny weaker and weaker, until nature as in compassion covers it with her mantle and it is seen no more.

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.

However, I also want to say this. The ranch standoff that took place out in Nevada was not about a man named Cliven Bundy. At the heart of this issue was my belief that our government is simply out of control. Now, to me, this was about a federal agency’s dangerous response to a situation that could have resulted in a catastrophe, and that means people dying and people being shot, kind of comparable to what we saw in Waco, Texas.