Quotes About Power

he warned that progressive accumulation of debt "is perhaps the NATURAL DISEASE of all Governments. And it is not easy to conceive anything more likely than this to lead to great and convulsive revolutions of Empire.

To those who feared oppressive taxes, Hamilton made an argument that anticipated "supply-side economics" of the late twentieth century, saying that officials "can have no temptation to abuse this power, because the motive of revenue will check its own extremes. Experience has shown that moderate duties are more productive than high ones."10

in the end he required political pull to do so. After years of wandering, Grant had popped up in the right congressional district in the right state. Lincoln had the power to appoint brigadier generals of volunteers, and the Illinois caucus enjoyed such sway that six Illinois brigadiers were selected, two more than any other state.

factions can become "potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.

such conduct in a man high in office argues greater attachment to his own power than to the public good and furnishes strong reason to suspect a dangerous predetermination to oppose whatever may tend to diminish the former, however it may promote the latter.

the government must degenerate either into an absolute and despotic monarchy or a tyrannical aristocracy.

Rather than make peace with John Adams, he was ready, if necessary, to blow up the Federalist party and let Jefferson become president.

Mirabeau, the French revolutionary politician, once observed of Talleyrand that he "would sell his soul for money and he would be right, for he would be exchanging dung for gold."32 Napoleon expressed this sentiment more concisely, calling Talleyrand "a pile of shit in a silk stocking.

By the end of Grant's second term, white Democrats, through the "redeemer" movement, had reclaimed control of every southern state, winning in peacetime much of the power lost in combat. They promulgated a view of the Civil War as a righteous cause that had nothing to do with slavery but only states' rights—to which an incredulous James Longstreet once replied, "I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.

he worried that a separate senate, elected solely by propertied voters, will "degenerate into a body purely aristocratical.

The power of the new mass media made Grant's illness a national spectacle, with his doctors offering twice-daily updates on his condition.

In the felicitous words of one early Burr biographer, "The Clintons had power, the Livingstons had numbers, and the Schuylers had Hamilton.

At the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.

So it may be said, with undoubted truth, that the whiskey drinkers made Mr. Jefferson the President of the United States.

The world of politics was filled with duplicitous people and Grant was poorly equipped to spot them, remaining an easy victim for crooked men. "They studied Grant, some of them, as the shoemaker measures the foot of his customer," wrote George Hoar.

old Abe is through with his next four years, we will put him [i.e., Grant]

BY 1798 the Federalist party had grown haughty by being too long in power. "When a party grows strong and feels its power, it becomes intoxicated, grows presumptuous and extravagant, and breaks to pieces," Johns Adams later wrote, having presided over just such a situation as president.

Far from hiding Black Jack, the irascible John Custis doted on him, and when the little boy was five, he submitted a petition to the governor to free the boy "christened John but commonly called Jack, born of the body of his Negro wench young Alice."19 To celebrate his emancipation, the boy was given four slaves as playmates.20 Obviously John Custis didn't rate very highly as a child psychologist.

Rockefeller feared that other states might copy this precedent and hold him hostage.

Things seldom happened accidentally to George Washington, but he managed them with such consummate skill that they often seemed to happen accidentally. By 1775 he had a fine sense of power—how to gain it, how to keep it, how to wield it.

While extremely powerful, they were also inhibited in exercising that power.

The clandestine payoffs made by Standard Oil were a different matter, and Rockefeller never stinted in making payments to get the job done.

Standard Oil of New York also made large loans to banks, brokerage houses, railroads, and steel companies.

It was an extraordinary transference of power to a private banker and further proof of Teddy Roosevelt's high regard for Morgan.