No country can be called free which is governed by an absolute power; and it matters not whether it be an absolute royal power or an absolute legislative power, as the consequences will be the same to the people.
— Thomas Paine
Floundering Absolute Power quotations
God has surely promised His grace to the humbled: that is, to those who mourn over and despair of themselves. But a man cannot be thoroughly humbled till he realizes that his salvation is utterly beyond his own powers, counsels, efforts, will and works, and depends absolutely on the will, counsel, pleasure and work of Another -- God alone.
In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.
Anarchy is the stepping stone to absolute power.
In the universe there is an immeasurable, indescribable force which shamens call intent, and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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 tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.
Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce...when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.
The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
The media is absolutely essential to the functioning of a democracy.
It's not our job to cozy up to power. We're supposed to be the check and balance on government.
The only way to keep from going backward is to keep going forward.
Eternal vigilance is the price of success. There are three steps, and each one is absolutely essential. You must first have the knowledge of your power; second, the courage to dare; third, the faith to do.
Federalism is the best curb on democracy.
[It] assigns limited powers to the central government. Thereby all power is limited. It excludes absolute power of the majority.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?
No matter who you are, no matter what you do, you absolutely, positively do have the power to change.
Every thought has the power to bring into being the visible from the invisible.
It is absolutely necessary for us all to understand that everything we think, do or say comes back to us. Every thought, word or action- without exception- manifests itself [in some way] as an actual reality.
The Book of Job is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of nature. Leviathan is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of the state.
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power...power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
For me, it always comes back to the land, respecting the land, the wildlife, the plants, the rivers, mountains, and deserts, the absolute essential bedrock of our lives. This is the source of where my power lies, the source of where all our power lies.
I shall not rest until Leeds United are kicked out of the football league.
Their fans are the scum of the earth, absolute animals and a disgrace. I will do everything in my power to make sure this happens.
It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, where does that leave God??
Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press.
Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians.
There is no sin or transgression, pain or sorrow, which is outside of the healing power of His Atonement.
The statesman must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among other powers. The popular mind, unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesman's thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil.
On 18th September 2014, between the hours of 7am and 10pm, absolute sovereign power will lie in the hands of the Scottish people. They have to decide whether to keep it, or give it away to where their minority status makes them permanently powerless and vulnerable.
Human potential is the same for all. Your feeling, 'I am of no value', is wrong. Absolutely wrong. You are deceiving yourself. We all have the power of thought — so what are you lacking? If you have will-power , then you can do anything. It is usually said that you are your own master.
Great men are almost always bad men.
All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.
No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.
If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.
Rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms.
... They cherish the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent.
Men, also, have in them enormous capacities that they have to repress and fear in themselves, living up to this obsolete and brutal man-eating, bear-killing, Ernest Hemingway, crewcut Prussian sadistic, napalm all the children in Vietnam, bang-bang you're dead, image of masculinity, the image of all powerful masculine superiority that is absolute.
Pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to 'see,' to 'see' with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me: absolute freedom!
If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
Conversion is a work above man's power.
.. Never think you can convert yourself. If ever you would be savingly converted, you must despair of doing it in your own strength. It is a resurrection from the dead, a new creation, a work of absolute omnipotence... Conversion is a supernatural work.