"When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny."
-Thomas Jefferson
"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.
"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
"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
"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
compiled from this site
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