A Quote by John Stuart Mill
A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.
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I am sometimes accused of being a dictator because I provoked the extraordinary elections by nominating the interim government. Can you imagine any dictator who provokes free elections in his own country?
A corporation has no rights except those given it by law. It can exercise no power except that conferred upon it by the people through legislation, and the people should be as free to withhold as to give, public interest and not private advantage being the end in view.
Behold your new mistress, my wife," he pronounced, "and know that when she bids you, I have bidden you. What service you render her, you are rendering me. What loyalty you give or withhold from her, you give or withhold from me!" -Royce Westmoreland
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
When someone who wields political power does something you dislike or disagree with, it's incumbent upon you to object, criticize, and demand a different course. Those who refuse to do so are abdicating the most basic duty of citizenship and rendering themselves impotent.
They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a peoples Government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.
A free society depends upon a high degree of mutual trust. The public will not give that trust to officials who are not seen to be impartially dedicated to the general public interest, nor will they give trust to those high in government who violate the rule of law they ask citizens to obey at the expense of self-interest, or to those who present government as the place where one feathers his own nest, [or] exchanges favors with friends and former associates.
I am voting in the midterm elections because I believe that when people engage with their local government, it reminds those placed in power that they are public servants who will be held accountable for their decisions.
We humans have had from time unknown the compulsion to name things and thus to be able to deal with them. The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it. And in ancient thought the name itself has power, so that to know someone's name is to have a certain power over him. And in some societies, as you know, there was a public name and a real or secret name, which would not be revealed to others.
The threat is that the public will know what the government is up to. Any system of power is going to want to keep free from public surveillance, that's natural. Its shouldn't be but, its very natural.
Now this circumscribed power, which we have scarcely examined, scarcely studied, this power to whose actions we nearly always attribute an intention and a goal, this power, finally, that always does necessarily the same things in the same circumstances and nevertheless does so many and such admirable ones, is what we call 'nature' .
Until fighting ends and there are conditions, which allow the free expression of will by the people, there can be no elections and elections are not held in these circumstances anywhere in the world.
Power not only corrupts he who wields the power but those who submit to it. Those who grovel at the feet of power betray their fellows to hide themselves behind the cloak of submission. It is an evil thing.
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.
An immigration violation should not give the government license to rip up the rule book. By restricting judicial oversight and blocking public scrutiny, the government has exercised virtually unchecked power over those it has detained.
Map reconciles himself to almost any event, however trying, if it happens in the ordinary course of nature. It is the extraordinary alone that he rebels against. There is a moral idea associated with this feeling; for the extraordinary appears to be something like an injustice of heaven.
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