A Quote by Thomas Jefferson

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.

Thomas Jefferson

Quote Topics

Citizens Exercise Feel Fellow Fellow Citizens His Honest Honest Man Man Over Pleasure Power

Quote Author

Thomas Jefferson
American - President
April 13, 1743 - July 4, 1826

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others... An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.... Power is not alluring to pure minds and is not with them the primary principle of contest.

Thomas Jefferson

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens . . . There has never been a moment of my life in which I should have relinquished for it the enjoyments of my family, my farm, my friends and books.

Thomas Jefferson

There is a power in public opinion in this country - and I thank God for it: for it is the most honest and best of all powers - which will not tolerate an incompetent or unworthy man to hold in his weak or wicked hands the lives and fortunes of his fellow-citizens.

Martin Van Buren

It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.

John Maynard Keynes

My power vanishes into thin air the instant that my fellow citizens, who are straight and honest, cease to believe that I represent them and fight for what is straight and honest. That is all the strength that I have.

Theodore Roosevelt

It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.

John Maynard Keynes

In a democracy, the citizens are supposed to have all the power, and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power, and citizens have very little.

Trevor Paglen

That Americans are entitled to freedom is incontestable on every rational principle. All men have one common original: they participate in one common nature, and consequently have one common right. No reason can be assigned why one man should exercise any power or preeminence over his fellow-creatures more than another; unless they have voluntarily vested him with it.

Alexander Hamilton

If I knew a miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable living, all the pleasure of doing good to others, all the esteem of his fellow-citizens, and the joys of benevolent friendship, for the sake of accumulating wealth. Poor man, said I, you pay too much for your whistle.

Benjamin Franklin

I regard the state of which I am a citizen as a public utility, like the organization that supplies me with water, gas, and electricity. I feel that it is my civic duty to pay my taxes as well as my other bills, and that it is my moral duty to make an honest declaration of my income to the income tax authorities. But I do not feel that I and my fellow citizens have a religious duty to sacrifice our lives in war on behalf of our own state, and, a fortiori, I do not feel that we have an obligation or a right to kill and maim citizens of other states or to devastate their land.

Arnold J. Toynbee

The man who is just and resolute will not be moved from his settled purpose, either by the misdirected rage of his fellow citizens, or by the threats of an imperious tryant.

Horace

The man who is tenacious of purpose in a rightful cause is not shaken from his firm resolve by the frenzy of his fellow citizens clamoring for what is wrong, or by the tyrant's threatening countenance.

Horace

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

Jacques Barzun

Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state.

Noah Webster

When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies...