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To enslave men successfully and safely it is necessary to keep their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the liberty of which they are deprived.
The complete collection
To enslave men successfully and safely it is necessary to keep their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the liberty of which they are deprived.
The plea for this outrage was then, as it is always, the tyrant's plea of necessity.
There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people.
A President is neither prince nor pope, and I don't seek a window on men's souls.
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.
The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.
It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.
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.
Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian.
The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.
Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.
The law, whether human or divine, is no respecter of persons; but the law is a respecter of reality.
Every citizen owes to the country a vigilant watch and close scrutiny of its public servants and a fair and reasonable estimate of their fidelity and usefulness.
Government has a right to survive and powers conferred upon it are not necessarily set at naught by the express prohibitions of the Bill of Rights.
My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures
One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected.
The worst evil of disregard for some law is that it destroys respect for all law.
Our whole system of self-government will crumble either if officials elect what laws they will enforce or citizens elect what laws they will support.
The animosities of elections should have no place in our Government, for government must concern itself alone with the common weal.
The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.
The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press
The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.
The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.
The press and even the pulpit, in the main either by silence or open apology, have condoned and encouraged this state of anarchy.