Politics & Power Quotes — page 155

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war …

The rights of neutrality will only be respected, when they are defended by an adequate power. A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral.

No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation.

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

There we have witnessed a spectacle of organised assassination, of the most cowardly character. Firing at men who were unsuspecting, firing from men who were dressed in the garb of peaceable citizens, and who are treated as such by the …

You can violate the law. The banks may violate the law and be sustained in doing so. But the President of the United States cannot violate the law.

It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside …

Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry-goods or the drug business. You've got to be trained up to it or you're sure to fail. p. 19

As property is in the main the chief subject-matter of legislation, so it is almost the only motive power of agitation. A violent political movement (setting aside those where religious controversy is at work) is generally only an …

No stops are ever inserted in Acts of Parliament, or in deeds; but the Courts of law, in construing them, must read them with such stops as will give effect to the whole.

You British are mad, like bulls seeing a red rag! What has happened to you to overwhelm us with suspicions that are unworthy of a great nation! What else shall I do? I have always described myself as a friend of Britain. ... Have I ever …

Now, however, we are coming into collision with facts which there can be no mistaking.

I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.

The state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability class antagonisms. The state arises when, where and to the extent that class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state …

we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes …

This commonwealth is determined, as it doubts not its co-states are, to submit to undelegated and consequently unlimited powers in no man, or body of men, on earth

[I]n proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact.

This primitive Republicanism, which admits monarchy as an occasional incident, but holds fast to the collective supremacy of all free men, of the constituent authority over all constituted authorities, is the remote germ of parliamentary …

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

Our whole education — made, be it noted, by Church and State, in the interests of both — revolts at this conception. Is it less true for that?

The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them wherever need of such control is shown

in the shape of those who would raise false issues, pervert facts, preach the gospel of hate, and minimize the importance of public action to secure human rights or spiritual ideals.

Our political capacity for avoiding upheavals, our gift for "animated moderation" (in Bagehot's phrase), has long been envied by our continental neighbours. They will find once again, I venture to prophesy, that we shall get together and …