Injustice and Oppression

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor are a favored few booted and spurred to ride them legitimately by the grace of God.

Mankind censure injustice fearing that they may be the victim of it, and not because they shrink from committing it.

The state, it cannot be too often repeated, does nothing and can give nothing which it has not taken from somebody.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.

Power is a means to an end.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Power must never be trusted without a check.

Power corrupts the few, but weakness corrupts the many.

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements, corrupts even more.

In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.

Each person must participate in government to affirm its support by the citizens or it will turn all its attention to the support of special interests which constantly seek favor.

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of today.

A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many, and various, and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.

During the whole period of written history, it is not the workers but the robbers who have been in control of the world.

The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and the exploiters.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, which needs to be more carefully guarded against than that one man should be allowed to become more powerful than the people.

A majority of one.

Any dictatorship can have only one aim: self-perpetuation.

A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing to lie.

With Necessity the tyrant will excuse his evil deeds.

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

Dictators always look good until the last minutes.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

The most tyrannical governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individual, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty.

With man degraded to a bundle of conditioned reflexes there remained only an aimless and turbulent moral relativity. This denial of the human soul was prefect preparation for the revival of tyranny.

He who desires obedience to a high degree of exactness cannot be satisfied with the power of giving pleasure, he must have the power of inflicting pain.

To require conformity in the appreciation of sentiments or the interpretation of language, or uniformity of thought, feeling or action, is a fundamental error in human legislation - a madness which would be only equaled by requiring all to possess the same countenance, the same voice, or the same nature.

The mere summoning of a witness and compelling him to testify against his will, about his beliefs, expressions or associations, is a measure of government interference.

We believe that the only security against the corruption of the few and the degradation of the many, is to give the great body of the people their political and social rights.

To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force.

You can't hold a man down without  staying down with him.

As a rule it was the pleasure haters that became unjust. - W. H. Auden

 

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