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| Objective Take a trip through time. View reasoning or criticisms of centralized power from one epoch and compare and contrast them against those of other epochs. Enjoy integrating them where it's possible to do that without forming a contradiction. Allow history to inform your judgments of the current policies and procedures of current administrations of current governments. Should we do any less than that? A Deeper Look Can choosing to do this kind of a thing ever -- in ANY context -- be legitimately considered to be wrong or immoral? In other words, is there a certain objectivity to the wisdom in the following quotes which cannot be abrogated by a zealous appeal to the variant contexts of who it is that is saying it, and in what particular, historical time -- i.e., zealous appeal to a vulgar subjectivity and historical relativism? A history of thought regarding centralized power ... 1687 ============ This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power is so necessary to, and closely joined with, a man's preservation, that he cannot part with it but by what forfeits his preservation and life together.--John Locke ============ 1748 ============ Fear is what is needed in a despotism. Virtue is not at all necessary, and honor would be dangerous.--Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu ============ 1762 ============ There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom, for in that way one captures volition itself.--Jean-Jacques Rousseau ============ 1782 ============ My opinion is, that power should always be distrusted, in whatever hands it is placed.--Sir William Jones ============ 1783 ============ Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.--William Pitt, the Younger ============ 1788 ============ The accumulation of all power, 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 ============ 1796 ============ Power is more easily manifested in destroying than in creating.--William Wordsworth ============ 1797 ============ Timid men ... prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.--Thomas Jefferson ============ 1811 ============ A power of the individuals who compose legislatures, to fish up wealth from the people ... will corrupt legislative, executive, and judicial public servants.--John Adams ============ 1813 ============ Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, makes slaves of men, and of the human frame, a mechanized automaton.--Percy Bysshe Shelley ============ 1824 ============ ... as cloaks for misgovernment, there is none more conspicuous in this atmosphere of illusion than the word Order.--Jeremy Bentham ============ 1829 ============ The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators.--William Henry Harrison ============ 1834 ============ It was to guard against the encroachments of power ... that this government was instituted, by the people themselves.--William Leggett The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim, denounces it, and excites the public odium and public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.--Henry Clay ============ 1845 ============ The state always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual--to make him subject to some generality or order.--Max Stirner ============ 1851 ============ To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue.--Peirre-Joseph Proudhon ============ 1862 ============ Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it ... the safety or the power of the country ... or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.--Lord Acton ============ 1866 ============ Ignorant power comes in the end to the same thing as wicked power; it makes misery.--George Eliot ============ 1870 ============ He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft.--James Russel Lowell ============ 1890 ============ The religious supersition consists in the belief that the sacrifices, often of human lives, made to the imaginary being are essential, and that men may and should be brought to that state of mind by all methods, not excluding violence. The political superstition consists in the belief that ... there are more important duties to the imaginary being, Government, and that the sacrifices--often of human lives--made to these imaginary beings are also essential, and that men may and should be brought to that state of mind by all possible means, not excluding violence.--Leo Tolstoy ============ 1891 ============ All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it.--Oscar Wilde ============ 1912 ============ ... all collectivist reform ... involves ... a society wherein the owners remain few and where the proletarian mass accept a security at the expense of servitude.--Hilaire Belloc ============ 1920 ============ No man ever ruled other men for their own good ... no man ever ruled other men for anything except for their undoing ... .--George D. Herron ============ 1925-1927 ============ The efficiency of a truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always concentrating it on a single enemy.--Adolf Hitler ============ 1930 ============ Under the species of syndicalism and fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.--Jose` Ortega y Gasset ============ 1932 ============ The capital point of the fascist doctrine is the conception of the State ... the work to be accomplished ... .--Benito Mussolini ============ 1933 ============ Any power must be the enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror and force, whether it arises under a fascist or Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development according to the individual.--Albert Einstein ============ 1935 ============ The state ... exercises the monopoly of crime. It ... lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.--Albert Jay Nock ============ 1936 ============ Integration of government agencies and coordination of authority may be called the keystone principle of fascist administration.--Lawrence Davis ============ 1937 ============ As long as men worship the Ceasars and Napoleans, the Ceasars and Napoleans will duly rise and make them miserable.--Aldous Huxley The ... motive of many socialists ... is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard.--George Orwell ============ 1940 ============ 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 L. Wilkie ============ 1944 ============ There is no justification for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary ... .--Friedrich A. Hayek ============ 1952 ============ All executive power--from the reign of ancient kinds to the rule of the modern dictators--has the outward appearance of efficiency.--William O. Douglas ============ 1956 ============ Totalitarianism is man's escape from the fearful realities of life into the virtual womb of the leader. ... The mystic center is in control of everything; man need no longer assume responsibility for his own life. The order and logic of the prenatal world reign. There is peace and silence, the peace of utter submission.--Joost A. Merloo ============ 1957 ============ There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power the government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.--Ayn Rand ============ 1958 ============ For while power in itself may have no more than a tendency to corrupt, absolute power, as Mill and Acton said, corrupts absolutely. It gives its holders a new importance, a new set of habits. Finding themselves worshipped by others, they soon come to worship themselves. Finding that they can do as they like, they indulge in actions that previously seemed so improbable of achievement as to be put beyond the realm of serious contemplation.--David Spitz ============ 1963 ============ The holistic planner overlooks the fact that it is easy to centralize power but impossible to centralize all that knowledge which ... would be necessary for the wise wielding of centralized power.--Sir Karl Popper ============ 1964 ============ War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion ... forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience ... individuals which lack the larger herd sense.--Randolph Bourne ============ 1966 ============ Plato's moral code is strictly utilitarian; it is the code of collectivist or political utilitarianism. The criterion of morality is what is in the interest of the state. Morality is nothing but political hygiene. This is the collectivist, the tribal, the totalitarian theory of morality: Good is what is in the interest of my group; or my tribe; or my state.--Sir Karl Popper ============ 1969 ============ Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.--Daniel Patrick Moynihan ============ 1971 ============ There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutions ... .--Eric Hoffer Terror has been effective historically only if the terrorizing groups are already in power. Groups trying to gain power have never been able to use terror effectively for any length of time.--Herbert Marcuse ============ 1972 ============ The history of totalitarian regimes is reflected in the evolution and perfection of the instruments of terror and more especially the police.--Carl J. Friedrich If a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery.--Gary Wills ============ 1981 ============ Liberalism has for the most part lost its historic objective in its growing fascination with the uses of centralized power. Where freedom from power was for a long time the chief end of liberal thought, participation in and control of power have become the chief idols of the liberal mind of our time.--Robert Nisbet ============ 1985 ============ To live without omnipotence existing somewhere is full of risk and frightening. The "fear of freedom" that many have talked of really is a fear deep within everyone's psyche that existence is not possible without omnipotence ... .--Eli Sagan Orwell knew that the Jacobins controlling a centralized economy are prepared, once they can claim the endorsement of the general will, to do anything in behalf of their conceptions of Reason and Virtue, and he knew that, just here, is the seedbed of the totalitarian state.--Nathan A. Scott, Jr. A totally socialized society has a high totalitarian potential. ... we need to encourage plural forms of ownership, plural forms of association, so that one can survive if it becomes necessary to oppose the groups in power.--Sidney Hook ============ 1990 ============ The principle impediment to personal independence and political freedom lies ... in the fact that man possesses a powerful passion to control others; that the most effective way to do so is by infantilizing them and pretending to care for them.--Thomas Szasz ============ | ||||
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