True Libertie Is lost, which alwayes with right Reason dwells 

Twinn'd, and from her hath no dividual being: 

Reason in man obscur'd, or not obeyd, 

Immediately inordinate desires

And upstart Passions catch the Government

From Reason, and to servitude reduce Man till then free. 

Therefore since hee permits 

Within himself unworthie Powers to reign

Over free Reason, God in Judgement just

Subjects him from without to violent Lords;   

Who oft as undeservedly enthrall His outward freedom:

Tyrannie must be,   

Though to the Tyrant thereby no excuse.

 

John Milton, Paradise Lost

 

 

Power

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

George Orwell, 1984

Man is cruelly wasteful of life when his own safety is endangered and he is sheltered by impunity, and little mercy is to be expected from him when he feels the sting of the reptile and is conscious of the power to destroy.

Washington Irving,  The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

Educating the electorate in the limits of executive power. No one wants to believe it. And anyway, in a democracy there's always an opposition to tell them that anything is possible.

P.A. James, A Taste for Death

Someone else’s fool is a joke, your own fool a calamity.

A folk proverb quoted by Solzhenitsyn.

We must not expect to find reason anywhere in Nature, but only the evidence of will!

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 

The laws keep up their credit, not for being just, but because they are laws; 'tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other, and it well answers their purpose. They are often made by fools, still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but always by men, vain and irresolute authors. There is nothing so much, nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws.

Montaigne

Let us boldly appeal to those who are in public affairs; let them lay their hands upon their hearts, and then say whether, on the contrary, they do not rather aspire to titles and offices and that tumult of the world to make their private advantage at the public expense. The corrupt ways by which in this our time they arrive at the height to which their ambitions aspire, manifestly enough declares that their ends cannot be very good. 

Michel de Montaigne

Virtue and ambition, unfortunately, seldom lodge together.

Michel de Montaigne

[Pericles] told them to wait quietly, to pay attention to their marine, to attempt no new conquests, and to expose the city to no hazards during the war, and doing this, promised them a favourable result. What they did was the very contrary, allowing private ambitions and private interests, in matters apparently quite foreign to the war, to lead them into projects unjust both to themselves and to their allies— projects whose success would only conduce to the honour and advantage of private persons, and whose failure entailed certain disaster on the country in the war.... each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude.

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

[R]elying on the Internet for facts and figures is making us mindless sloths.... a study in Science ...  demonstrates that the wealth of information readily available on the Internet disinclines users from remembering what they’ve found out.


Sue Halpern, "How Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over," New York Review (April 2, 2015)

Mistakes are good.  The more mistakes, the better.  People who make mistakes get promoted.  They can be trusted.  Why?  They're not dangerous.  They can't be too serious.  People who don't make mistakes eventually step off cliffs, a bad thing because anyone in free fall is considered a liability.  They might land on you.

James Church, A Corpse in the Koryo

In attitude and proportion the graceful majesty of the figure is unsurpassed. The effect is completed by the countenance, where on the perfection of youthful godlike beauty there dwells the consciousness of triumphant power.

Thomas Bulfinch, commenting on the Apollo Belvedere in Bulfinch's Mythology.