Politics & Power Quotes — page 156

London owes everything to its press: it owes as much to its press as it does to its being the seat of government and the law.

Industry must be humanized, not destroyed. It must be the instrument not of selfishness, but of service. Change not the law, but the attitude of the mind. Let our citizens look not to the false prophet but to the pilgrims. Let them fix …

If they have real grievances redress them, if possible; or acknowledge the justice of them, and your inability to do it at the moment. If they have not, employ the force of government against them at once.

Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.

In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them

You cannot in the existing state of Ireland punish a policeman who shoots a man whom he has every reason to suspect is concerned with the police murders. This kind of thing can only be met by reprisals.

[A] measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day.

Certainly all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently the theory of every such government must be, that an act of the legislature, repugnant …

For the rational study of the law the blackletter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.

They learned how to put up a pretty good bluff—and bluff counts a lot in politics. p. 18

Moderation, especially in the matter of territory, has never been characteristic of democracy. Wherever it has had free play, in the ancient world or in the modern, in the old hemisphere or the new, a thirst for empire, and a readiness for …

All laws stand on the best and broadest basis which go to enforce moral and social duties.

Imagine a monarch, holding personal command of his army, disbanding his regiments, sacred with a hundred years of history—and handing his towns over to Anarchists and Democracy.

At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that labor-saving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth …

Complete civil disobedience is a state of peaceful revolution, a refusal to obey every single state-made law.

The state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it creates "order," which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the collision between the classes.

Omnium rerum domina, virtus. Virtue is the mistress of all things. Virtue is the master of all things. Therefore a nation that should never do wrong must necessarily govern the world. The might of virtue, the power of virtue, is not a very …

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.

since the unanimous vote that no change [should] be made in the funding system, my imagination will not attempt to set bounds to the daring depravity of the times. The stock-jobbers will become the pretorian band of the Government, at once …

Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and …

It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you both your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal …

It is only by the abolition of the State, by the conquest of perfect liberty by the individual, by free agreement, association, and absolute free federation that we can reach Communism — the possession in common of our social inheritance, …