The quote database

I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them

Numa's virtue made him so celebrated that he was judged worthy to be king, Lykurgus' made him so great that he did not care to be king.

This custom of ostracism was not intended as a punishment for crime, but was called, in order to give it a plausible title, a check to excessive power.

A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.

Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.

Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.

While the Constitution diffuses power the better to secure liberty, it also contemplates that practice will integrate the dispersed powers into a workable government.

With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations.

Presidential powers are not fixed but fluctuate, depending upon their disjunction or conjunction with those of Congress.

Our Government has no power except that granted it by the people.

We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens.

The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles

Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him?

I advance with obedience to the work, ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choice it is in your power to make

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.

When the world was over run with tyranny the least remove therefrom was a glorious rescue.

Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices.

Government with insolence is despotism; but when contempt is added it becomes worse; and to pay for contempt is the excess of slavery.

It is over the lowest class of mankind that government by terror is intended to operate, and it is on them that it operates to the worst effect.

The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting its government.

A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution.

The enormous expense of governments has provoked people to think, by making them feel; and when once the veil begins to rend, it admits not of repair.

war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men's characters to a level with their fortunes