Top 57 Arbitrary Power Quotes
#1. It is true, indeed, that the national domain is ours. It is true it was acquired by the valor and with the wealth of the whole nation. But we hold, nevertheless, no arbitrary power over it.
William H. Seward
#2. Law and arbitrary power are at eternal enmity.
Edmund Burke
#3. A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness.
Edward Gibbon
#4. Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.
George Washington
#5. The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.
Frederick Law Olmsted
#6. One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.
Larry Wall
#7. Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used
not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#8. Manners matter, asserts the professor. What provokes rebellion, he asserts, is not as often a theory out allowing for arbitrary power but be excessive, brusque use of it by a particular individual.
Robert J. Allison
#9. There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.
Alan Greenspan
#10. Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.
Abigail Adams
#11. If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.
Algernon Sidney
#12. I believe that all of us have gangster proclivities and greedy orientations that need accountability. That's why democracies are necessary. We have to have institutions to try to curtail the use of arbitrary power so that our greedy orientations and gangster-like proclivities don't get out of hand.
Cornel West
#13. The most insupportable of tyrants exclaim against the exercise of arbitrary power.
Roger L'Estrange
#14. Independent of its connection with human destiny hereafter, the fate of republican government is indissolubly bound up with the fate of the Christian religion, and a people who reject its holy faith will find themselves the slaves of their own evil passions and of arbitrary power.
Lewis Cass
#15. Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.
Jonathan Swift
#16. FCC power rests on ... nonobjective law (which) delivers men's lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim.
Ayn Rand
#17. This, then, is freedom in the external life of man-that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows.
Ludwig Von Mises
#18. What is called a republic, is not any particular form of government ... it is naturally opposed to the word monarchy, which means arbitrary power.
Thomas Paine
#19. There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.
Isabel Paterson
#20. The danger to a free society is not the guns owned by the citizens but an unconstrained government ... An armed society is a self-governing society, just as a disarmed people are vulnerable to arbitrary power of every kind.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#21. Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.
John Locke
#22. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.
Arthur Koestler
#23. The power to determine the quantity of money ... is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power.
Milton Friedman
#24. In the war I was subject to military law, but subject to law nevertheless; now I am at the mercy of an arbitrary power.
Victor Klemperer
#25. I have seen the rise of fascism and communism. Both philosophies glorify the arbitrary power of the state ... But both theories fail. Both deny those God-given liberties that are the inalienable right of each person on this planet, indeed, they deny the existence of God.
Ronald Reagan
#26. Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.
John Quincy Adams
#27. [...] and if then women do not resign the arbitrary power of beauty - they will prove that they have less mind than man.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#28. The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization.
Mercy Otis Warren
#29. Arbitrary power is the natural object of temptation to a prince, as wine and women to a young fellow, or a bribe to a judge, or avarice to old age ...
Jonathan Swift
#30. The bad man desires arbitrary power. What moves the evil man is the love of injustice.
John Rawls
#31. Freedom under law is hard work. If rulers cannot be trusted with arbitrary power, it is up to citizens to raise their voices at injustice.
Anthony Lewis
#32. The aim of all struggles for liberty is to keep in bounds the armed defenders of peace, the governors and their constables. The political concept of the individual's freedom means: freedom from arbitrary action on the part of the police power.
Ludwig Von Mises
#33. [C]ensorship in any form is the opening wedge for fascism, since it places arbitrary and unwarranted power in the hands of individuals.
Jack Parsons
#34. The job of the press is to speak truth to power. And yet, for doing our job, we are persecuted. I say that these aggressive and illegal tactics to silence us - inventing arbitrary legal interpretations, over-zealous charges and disproportionate sentences - must not be permitted to succeed.
Sara Harrison
#35. The truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion.
Walt Whitman
#37. Arbitrary government power is being multiplied daily by the now practically unchallenged assumption that wherever there is any problem of any kind to be solved, government is the agency to step in and solve it.
Henry Hazlitt
#38. Custine described them as 'automata inconvenienced with a soul': a description true, perhaps, of all bureaucrats fearful for their jobs but truest of all where power is both arbitrary and completely centralised, as it was in Russia.
Theodore Dalrymple
#39. Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.
Thomas Sowell
#40. Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society and made by the legislative power vested in it and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man.
John Locke
#41. It is a very bad idea for governments to create arbitrary and unfair outcomes, or outcomes resulting from the passions and whims of the government rather than from the law, just because they have the power to do so.
Paul Singer
#42. My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power.
Junot Diaz
#43. What the Ambassador was witnessing - in idea, if not yet in fact - was the transfer of power from its arbitrary exercise by nobles and monarchs to power stationed in a constitution and in representation of the people. The period of the transfer, coinciding with his own career, from 1767 to 1797,
Barbara W. Tuchman
#44. The decree of a coercive tribunal would not need to conform to the true standard of wages, the final productivity of social labor. It would introduce into distribution a genuinely arbitrary element, with a very large ultimate power to pervert the natural system.
John Bates Clark
#45. How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity?
Michel Foucault
#46. The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power, and preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.
William J. Brennan
#47. We are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed in defiance of international good faith at the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power.
H. H. Asquith
#48. Why is it that we all - myself included - believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and arbitrary and drunk with power? It's because everything seems so arbitrary, because there's no accountability or transparency in the DHS.
Bruce Schneier
#49. Arbitrary rule has its basis, not in the strength of the state or the chief, but in the moral weakness of the individual, who submits almost without resistance to the domineering power.
Friedrich Ratzel
#50. Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself. Be true to the highest within your soul and then allow yourself to be governed by no customs or conventionaliti es or arbitrary man-made rules that are not founded on principle.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#51. We dispute the arbitrary distribution of power and wealth, which is claimed as the natural order, but which is in fact not natural at all but rather artificially created and sustained by ancient privileges.
Kate Elliott
#52. The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.
Rebecca West
#53. Strength we think to be a virtue in government, but we do not find our defense against disintegration either in arbitrary or in very great power. Indeed, we are inclined to see in both these the symptoms of an already advanced decay
Michael Oakeshott
#54. Chang despised authority on principle, for even when veiled by the rubric of practical necessity or the weight of tradition he could not see institutional power as anything but an expression of arbitrary personal will, and it galled him profoundly.
Gordon Dahlquist
#55. Terrorists can endanger some of us, but the war on terror endangers us all. How much more can the Constitution be diminished before it is completely replaced by arbitrary government power?
Paul Craig Roberts
#56. I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country, and the least encroachment of those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil.
Benjamin Franklin
#57. The birth of science rang the death-knell of an arbitrary and constantly interposing Supreme Power.
Annie Besant
