Public Authority Quotes

For a war to be just, three conditions are necessary—public authority, just cause, right motive.

The people are, in fact, the fountain of all power.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

The people are the government, administering it by their agents; they are the government, the sovereign power.

The sovereignty of the people is inalienable.

When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men. By political power we refer to the mutual relations of control among the holders of public authority and between the latter and the people at large.

Show me the man who keeps his house in hand, He's fit for public authority.

Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.

Government is the majority’s!

All power is lodged in, and consequently derived from, the people. We should wear it as a breastplate, and buckle it on as our armour.

Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. Liberty alone demands for its realization the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition.

If the 19th [century] was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state.

It should go without saying that regular citizens have no authority to arrest or detain anyone.

The very existence of society depends on the fact that every member of it tacitly admits he is not the exclusive possessor of himself, and that he admits the claim of the polity of which he forms a part, to act, to some extent, as his master.

The people want to exercise power but what on earth would they do with it if it were given to them?

Our sovereign, the people.

Order is said to exist where the people of the country have, as a general rule, ceased to prosecute their quarrels by private force, and acquired the habit of referring the decision of their disputes and the redress of their injuries to the public authorities.

The beauty of our democracy is that the final authority is not the president of the United States, but instead the American public through their duly elected representatives in the United States Congress.

Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities.

Obedience to public authority ought not to be based either on ignorance or stupidity.

Government power, juxtaposed to private power, is a balance.

No business is above government, and government must be empowered to deal adequately with any business that tries to rise above government.

The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.

Nay, all laws must fall, human societies that subsist by them be dissolved, and all innocent persons be exposed to the violence of the most wicked, if men might not justly defend themselves against injustice by their own natural right, when the ways prescribed by publick authority cannot be taken.

The books of jurisprudence were interesting to few, and entertaining to none: their value was connected with present use, and they sunk forever as soon as that use was superseded by the innovations of fashion, superior merit, or public authority.