"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing."

John Adams, (1735-1826) US diplomat, patriot, and Federalist politician, 2nd president of US 1797-1801
"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!"

Samuel Adams

"Any excuse will serve a tyrant."

Aesop

"They (women) may not be interested in whom to bomb but they are interested in knowing how foreign policy impacts our daily lives."

US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, War Criminal 

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less 
apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious."

Aristotle, Greek philosopher (384 BC - 322 BC) Source: Politics, 343 B.C.

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone."

Frederic Bastiat , French laissez-faire economist (1801-1850)

"But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."

Frederic Bastiat

"The framers [of the Constitution] knew that free speech is the friend of change and revolution. But they also knew that it is always the deadliest enemy of tyranny."

Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black (1960)

"As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago."

Robert Bork

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience."

Albert Camus (1913-1960)

"The desire to rule is the mother of heresies."

St. John Chrysostom
"Find out just what the people will submit to and you will have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

Frederick Douglass

"Abuse of power isn't limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we're not vigilant."

Clint Eastwood, Source: Parade Magazine, 12 January 1997
"Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true."

Eric Hoffer

"I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police."

Justice Robert H. Jackson, Source: The Supreme Court in the American System of Government, 1955

"Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry"

Thomas Jefferson

"When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny."

Thomas Jefferson

      
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"Persecution, whenever it occurs, establishes only the power and cunning of the persecutor, not the truth and worth of his belief."

H. M. Kallen, (1882-1974)
"Nothing is so opportune for tyrants as a people tired of its liberty."

Alan Keyes

"We may well soon be subjected to anything that judges want to enforce.... The result will be an enforced inability of the states to pass laws that reflect the principled judgment of their own citizens....And as our Founders taught us so well, ...[that] will be the end of liberty and the establishment of
tyranny in America."

Alan Keyes

"The rule of Christ is totalitarian. That truth leaves no room for totalitarian rule by men. When men seek to exercise totalitarian rule, they arrogate to themselves that which belongs to Christ alone. A totalitarian state cannot but collide head-on with the kingdom of Christ. In a word, state totalitarianism is a manifestation of antichrist. There are many antichrists in the world, but none bolder than this."

R. B. Kuiper, 1886-1966

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Milan Kundera, novelist

Dictatorship (n):a form of government under which everything which is not prohibited is compulsory.

Stephen Leacock

"The political terms 'will' and 'popular will' have a long track record in Western history going back to Rousseau. That record is profoundly anti-democratic, essentially inviting elites to interpret what the common people believe and want. In litigious modern America, that would be a judicial elite telling us how we meant to vote or should have voted."

John Leo

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."

C.S. Lewis

"Towering genius...thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freeman."

Abraham Lincoln, 1838

"Just and moderate governments are every where quiet, every where safe. But oppression raises ferments, and makes men struggle to cast off an uneasy and tyrannical yoke."

John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration [1689]
"We are headed in this country towards a totalitarianism every bit as dangerous towards freedom as the other more forthright forms. We have our secret police, our thought control agencies, our over-powering bureaucracy. . . . The American State, like every other State, is governed by those who have a compulsion to power, to centralization, to the preservation of their gains."

Robert Ludlow, editor of the Catholic Worker, 1951 
"The most stringent curb that ever legislation imposed on tyranny."
Thomas B. MacAulay, on Habeas Corpus, History of England, I [1848]
"The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

James Madison, The Federalist, No. 47
"When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a single body of the magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically.

Nor is there liberty if the power of judging is not separate from legislative power and from executive power. If it were joined to legislative power, the power over the life and liberty of the citizens would be arbitrary, for the judge would be the legislator. If it were joined to the executive power, the judge could have the force of an oppressor."

Baron Charles Secondat de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book 11
"The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny."

Michael Oakeshott
"The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny."

Michael Parenti, (1933- )
"According to Gestapo records... they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them."
 
Kort E. Patterson, Source: Port of Call, August/September 1999
"A danger exists that the United States is becoming a police state. Just a few decades ago, this would have been unimaginable. The American republic was not designed with federal police powers, which should be the sole prerogative of the states. The military should not be used as police. Unfortunately, many Americans now welcome the use of military troops to police our public places, especially airports. Even before Sept. 11th, more than 80,000 armed federal bureaucrats patrolled the countryside, checking for violations of federal laws and regulations. That number since September has increased by nearly 50% -- and it will not shrink any time soon. Meanwhile, a military takeover of homeland security looks certain. Can freedom and prosperity survive if the police state continues to expand?"

Rep. Ron Paul, April 2002

"Providence hath laid bounds on the king's power, and made it fatherly and not masterly; so that if it, the power, exceed the bounds of fatherly power, and pass over to the despotical and masterly power, it may be resisted by the people....

A power contrary to justice, to peace and the good of the people, that looketh to no law as a rule, and so is unreasonable, and forbidden by the law of God and the civil law.... cannot be lawful power, and cannot constitute a lawful judge; but an absolute and unlimited power is such. How can the judge be the minister of God for good to the people (Romans 13:4) if he have such power as a king, given to him of God, to destroy and waste the people."

Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex
"...[T]yranny may creep in under the outward forms of traditional law."

Joseph Sobran

"I've often marveled that modern man has more faith in the State than medieval man had in the Church. Though the State's utopian promises have been kept by fraud at best, and war and mass murder at worst, its authority has hardly been impaired by experience -- probably because it has taken charge of education and erased its subjects' memory of its own crimes. ... By now even ordinary people should talk about the State in the same mordant tones in which Jews talk about Hitler. But modern man not only still obeys the State (he has little choice) but still expects it to better the human condition. He thinks of Hitler as an unfortunate anomaly, with whom his own rulers have taught him they have nothing whatever in common...."

Joseph Sobran

"Our stereotyped image of dictatorship is one-man rule. A single man (usually recognized by his funny mustache) somehow imposes his will on an entire population, who endure his autocracy in fearful silence. In truth, successful dictators are usually very popular. Their regimes are distinguished not by silence but by roaring crowds and festive rallies... Tyranny requires more than suppression. It has to make as many people as possible dependent on the regime for jobs and other benefits."

Joseph Sobran,(2/8/96)

"Tyranny seldom announces itself. ...In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical."

Joseph Sobran

"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"People have no idea how significant this is. Really a time of shame this is for the American system. The strange thing is that we have become sort of constitutional couch potatoes. The Congress just gave the President despotic powers and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to Dancing With the Stars. It's otherworldly..People clearly don't realize what a fundamental change it is about who we are as a country. What happened today changed us. And I'm not too sure we're gonna change back anytime soon."

Jonathan Turley, commenting on the Military Commissions Act of 2006

"The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position."

George Washington, Source: Farewell Address, September 17, 1796, Ref: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (521)

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."

Daniel Webster
 
"There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country - if the 
people lose their confidence in themselves - and lose their roughness and spirit of 
defiance."

Walt Whitman
"It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. 
Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong."

Wendell Willkie
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