Misrule Quotes

The worst government is the most moral.

The shortest way to ruin a country is to give power to demogogues.

No state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.

When any one person or body of men seize into their hands the power in the last resort, there is properly no longer a government, but what Aristotle and his followers call the abuse and corruption of one.

War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.

Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who posses it; and this I know, my lords: that where law ends, tyranny begins.

Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel!

Dictators always look good until the last ten minutes.

Dictators cause the world's worst problems: all the collapsed states, and all the devastated economies. All the vapid cases of corruption, grand theft, and naked plunder of the treasury are caused by dictators, leaving in their wake trails of wanton destruction, horrendous carnage and human debris.

An emperor will be born near Italy who will do his country much harm … He will rise from a soldier to the throne.

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

Clergy had not only identified themselves with the repression of free thought, and of physical science … but that they had proved themselves utterly unfit, for centuries past, to exercise any censorship whatsoever over the thoughts of men: that they had identified themselves with the cause of darkness, not of light; with persecution and torture … the clergy interfered perpetually with the sanctity of family life, as well as with the welfare of the state; that their evil counsels, and specially those of the Jesuits, had been patent and potent causes of much of the misrule and misery of Louis XIV.'s and XV.'s reigns

[A] representative of... a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity, Blood.

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

Since the origin of the world there has never been a king—even if you were to select the very best—who did not in some measure abuse his authority…

To the fool-king belongs the world.

A monarch is at all times that of an enemy of the people," acting by force, fear, corruption, and delusion through his three human instruments, the soldier, the lawyer, and the priest, to produce in all times and at all places the greatest infelicity of the greatest number.

Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution; disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.

The greatest of all evils is a weak government.

The Georges were fair; they left all to the Government; but Anne was very bad and a tyrant. She tyrannised over the Irish. She died broken-hearted with all the bad things that were going on about her. For Queen Anne was very wicked; oh, very wicked, indeed!

This is the worst administration since Caligula.

By terrorising the people, the Taliban have sown deep doubts about the government.

The whole of your political conduct has been one continued series of weakness, temerity, despotism, ignorance, futility, negligence, blundering, and the most notorious senility, incapacity, and corruption.

The great question which, in all ages, has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of those mischiefs which have ruined cities, depopulated countries, and disordered the peace of the world, has been, not whether there be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it.