Quotes about Unconstrained Authority

Clark M. Clifford

[President Jimmy Carter] had so much going for him. He was elected without any real commitments.... To come in with no commitments gives a President a marvelous, broad flexible horizon of operation.

Thomas Hobbes

They who among men obtain the chiefest Dominion, cannot be subject to Laws properly so called, that is to say, to the will of men, because to be chief, and subject, are contradictories;

This was a prevailing philosophical view in England and other monarchies. American Founding Fathers were quite familiar with Hobbes’ works and views and many specifically rejected it. Some of the Federalists wanted to extend some of the traditional prerogatives of monarchy to the American Presidency while the Jeffersonian Republican Democrats wanted the executive treated like any, one else before the law. Today that view generally holds, but there is a vestige of the Hobbes’ view still present in things like Executive Privilege.

Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford

The little finger of prerogative was heavier than the loins of the law

1st Earl of Strafford

Werner Herzog

I had complete freedom. They [Netflix] knew roughly what I was doing.

Hermann Goering

My measures will not be sickled over with legalistic doubts .... Here I do not have to exercise justice; here I have only to annihilate.

Abraham Kuyper

Genius is a sovereign power; it forms schools; it lays hold on the spirits of men, with irresistible might; and it exercises an immeasurable influence on the whole condition of human life. This sovereignty of genius is a gift of God, possessed only by his grace. It is subject to no one and is responsible to him alone who has granted it this ascendancy.

Robert Caro

Robert Moses wasn't elected to anything. We're taught that in a democracy power comes from being elected. He had more power than anyone, and he held it for 48 years.

Simone Weil

To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.

Unconstrained Authority Quotes