A Quote by Walter Lippmann

Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.

Walter Lippmann

Quote Topics

Been Corrupted Destroyed Enemies Established Ever Few Friends Governments Institutions Until Very Weakened

Quote Author

Walter Lippmann
American - Journalist
September 23, 1889 - December 14, 1974

Government has no right to make itself a party in any debates respecting the principles or mode of forming or of changing, constitutions. It is not for the benefit of those who exercise the powers of government, that constitutions, and the governments issuing from them, are established.

Thomas Paine

Our constitutions purport to be established by 'the people,' and, in theory, 'all the people' consent to such government as the constitutions authorize. But this consent of 'the people' exists only in theory. It has no existence in fact. Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given.

Lysander Spooner

Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.

Wendell Phillips

Liberal institutions straightway cease being liberal the moment they are soundly established: Once this is attained, no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There may have been somewhere, as a few eighteenth-century philosophers dreamed, a group of peaceful men who got together one evening after work and drew up a Social Contract to form the state. But nobody has been able to find an actual record of it. Practically all the governments whose origins are historically established were the result of conquest-of one tribe by another, one city by another, one people by another. Of course there have been constitutional conventions, but they merely changed the working rules of governments already in being.

Henry Hazlitt

None but a people advanced to a high state of moral and intellectual excellence are capable in a civilized condition of forming and maintaining free governments, and among those who are so far advanced, very few indeed have had the good fortune to form constitutions capable of endurance.

John C. Calhoun

More people have been ruined by their upright friends than ever have been by their enemies!

Leslie Ford

Governments have been ceding power to big multinational corporations in the market. We see the manifest in a variety of ways. Where governments are giving up power to big international institutions like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, which are disabling governments' ability to protect the rights of their own people.

Noreena Hertz

Many men are loved by their enemies, and hated by their friends, and are the friends of their enemies, and the enemies of their friends.

Plato

Any politician who's ever been re-elected knows that friends come and go; enemies accumulate.

Jim Cooper

Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check. The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever.

Murray Rothbard

You just don't understand humility until you have children and get divorced. I was very hurt and very angry and so was she. But when kids are involved, you either become friends with respect or you become mortal enemies.

Val Kilmer

We often wonder that certain men and women are left by God to the commission of sins that shock us. We wonder how, under the temptation of a single hour, they fall from the very heights of virtue and of honor into sin and shame. The fact is that there are no such falls as these, or there are next to none. These men and women are those who have dallied with temptation--have exposed themselves to the influence of it, and have been weakened and corrupted by it.

J. G. Holland

This act is as horrible as killing a cancer cell. It must be done for the sake of the future of the whole. So be it: be prepared for the selection process which is now beginning. We, the elders, have been patiently waiting until the very last moment before the quantum transformation, to take action to cut out this corrupted and corrupting element in the body of humanity. It is like watching a cancer grow; something must be done before the whole body is destroyed... The destructive one fourth must be eliminated from the social body.

Barbara Marx Hubbard

The Assembly has witnessed over the last weeks how historical truth is established; once an allegation has been repeated a few times, it is no longer an allegation, it is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.