For those looking for security, be forewarned that there’s nothing more insecure than a political promise.
Category: demagogues
The pretext of ‘necessity’
The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators.
Watch your ‘leaders’
The danger to all well-established free governments arises from the unwillingness of the people to believe in … the influence of designing men … This is the old trick of those who would usurp the government of their country. In the name of democracy they speak, warning the people against the influence of wealth and the danger of aristocracy … The tendencies of all such governments in their decline is to monarchy … and, like the false Christs whose coming was foretold by the Savior, seeks to, and were it possible would, impose upon the true and most faithful disciples of liberty. It is in periods like this that it behooves the people to be most watchful of those to whom they have intrusted power.
Skepticism needed
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
Never let a good crisis go to waste
Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.
The song of the tyrant
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Power seekers
Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny.
Secondary agenda
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: Not the chance to serve.
Of the people, by the people, and for the people
[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Ordained to rule
People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange, and are for control and coercion, believe they have more intelligence and superior wisdom to the masses. What’s more, they believe they’ve been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course, they have what they consider good reasons for doing so, but every tyrant that has ever existed has had what he believed were good reasons for restricting the liberty of others.