Cant remember where i got this lot from but its still interesting and very valid in todays climate.
"The kings of the nations lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called Benefactors." (One of the sayings of Jesus reported in St Luke's Gospel, 1st century A.D.)
"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." (From notes by the future President of the United States John Adams, 1772.)
"Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State." (Point 6 of the 10-point programme in Section 2 of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848.)
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it." (From a speech by the future President of the United States Woodrow Wilson, 1912.)
"Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power. " (From The Recrudescence of Puritanism by Bertrand Russell, 1928.)
"What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?" (From act 1 of The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw, 1930.)
"Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do." (From the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno by Pope Pius XI, 1931.)
"The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced." (From chapter 1 of Ends and Means by Aldous Huxley, 1937.)
"If you pretend that it [Fascism] is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon." (From chapter 12 of The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, 1937.)
"The financial burden of the peasant was crushing. Not only did he pay the poll-tax and the twentieth of his income... but in addition he paid a tithe of the produce of his land to the Church, another large land-tax to the King, a [salt-tax], a customs-duty if he took his goods through a village, and a money-due to the local lord when his grapes went to the lord's wine-press or his corn to the lord's mill (and they had to go). ...And yet it was not so much from the peasantry as from the more prosperous members of the Third Estate... that the impulse towards revolution came. ...Above all, they felt themselves unfairly excluded from all share in government." (From chapter 1 (The Causes of the French Revolution) of An Illustrated History of Modern Europe, 1789-1945 by Denis Richards, third edition 1950.)
"The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots." (From chapter 9 of The Sane Society by Erich Fromm, 1955.)
"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you." (In a speech to Western diplomats by the leader of the former Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, 1956.)
"[Working-class people's] relations with the police... are [often] good, but good or bad, they tend to regard the policeman primarily as someone who is watching them, who represents the authority which has its eye on them, rather than as a member of the public services whose job it is to help and protect them. They are close to the police and know something of the bullying and petty corruption that can sometimes exist." (From chapter 3 of The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart, 1957.)
"The high public official is expected, and indeed is to some extent required, to expound the conventional wisdom. ...Before assuming office he ordinarily commands little attention. But on taking up his position he is immediately assumed to be gifted with deep insights. ...The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events." (From sections III and IV of chapter 1 of The Affluent Society by J.K.Galbraith, 1958.)
"The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take." (From chapter 10 of Parkinson's Law by C.Northcote Parkinson, 1958.)
"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern." (From the preface added in 1960 toThe Screwtape Letters by C.S.Lewis.)
"In the United States, for example, there are hundreds of books dealing with civil liberties. So far as is known, this is the first book which attempts to survey comprehensively the state of civil liberties in Britain. ...It is in the belief that our liberties will be the more firmly established the better their extent and limitations are appreciated, that the following survey is attempted." (From the Introduction to Freedom, the Individual and the Law by Harry Street, second edition 1967.)
"At a sherry party given by the lady members of the County Council to the wives of Chief Officers, a member went up to my wife and said that I - as County Surveyor - was 'murdering' the children at Lower Hogwash because I had successfully opposed an unreasonable speed limit. ...It was many times said to me, when I asked why people wanted a [speed] limit, 'Oh, yes, we know it won't stop accidents, but it will enable the police to prosecute drivers.' " ( J.J.Leeming, former County Surveyor of Dorset, in an article in Road & Track magazine, February 1970, pages 41-45. The article, Do Speed Limits Work? was originally published in Motor magazine.)
"...the New York State Police concluded that they had to present to the legislature proof that their search-and-destroy anti-speed tactics were producing results in reducing accidents. Because this was statistically impossible, the trooper hierarchy quietly passed the word to its outposts across the state to let local sheriff's departments and city police investigate as many traffic accidents as possible - thereby producing numerical evidence that while the State Police issued more speeding tickets, they investigated fewer accidents! A preposterous tale of bureaucratic abuse, but a fair example of how the entire question of speed law enforcement has become detached from the public interest and can, as in this instance, run contrary to it as agencies seek to justify their existence." ( Brock Yates in Car and Driver magazine, February 1970, page 12.)
"We 'undergo' much of reality... through the instant diagnostic sociology of the mass media. No previous society has mirrored itself with such profuse fascination." (On page 67 of In Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner, 1971.)
"I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back." ( Leo Tolstoy ,quoted in chapter 14 of Small is Beautiful by E.F.Schumacher, 1973.)
"Regard any new idea from below with suspicion - because it is new and because it is from below. Control everything carefully. Count anything that can be counted, frequently. Make decisions to reorganize or change policies in secret and spring them on people unexpectedly." (Rules for stifling initiative, in The Change Masters by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, 1981.)
"...I am always surprised by how much of what is considered politically impossible today turns out to be quite acceptable tomorrow. ...More than that I believe that what is right needs to be said. If this involves going back to first principles, then however removed they may be from our present experience, we have a responsibility to go back." (On page 118 of Morality and the Market Place by Brian Griffiths, 1982.)
"...the threat of man-made global catastrophe developed a life of its own; it could no more be disinvented than the nuclear bomb. When the prospect of nuclear war faded in the late 1980s, the vacuum was immediately filled by fears of a disaster which, though more subtle and insidious, was of a similar order of magnitude. The agents of destruction this time were pollution, global warming and the hole in the ozone layer. As with nuclear weapons, the danger may have been real enough; but there were also signs that an ancient dynamic had re-established itself. The Green lobby invariably talked as if the process of decline was accelerating; it divided the world neatly into heroes and villains and effectively presented its audience with the alternatives of the destruction of mankind by an angry planet or the establishment of a post-industrial utopia." (On pages 133-134 of The End of Time by Damian Thompson, 1996.)
"A butcher who has no driving convictions has been stopped by the police 34 times in two years. ...The man believes his mistake was in successfully complaining about a wrongful arrest. It's not just young black men who suffer harassment when they challenge the force. A Tory peer says he was hounded by the police when he refused to take a breath test after being stopped several times for no apparent reason. It seems that people who dare to criticise the men in blue, or show any disrespect, suddenly find themselves living in a police state." ( Alice Thomson in the Daily Telegraph, 20 January 1999, page 22.)
"In Germany, traffic surveillance has long since become a business worth billions!" ("Verkehrsüberwachung ist in Deutschland längst ein Milliardengeschäft geworden!") (From the website
www.radarfalle.de , 1999 to date.)
"So Councillor [X] doesn't like [Controlled Parking Zones], and only introduces them when the residents vote for them... I live in one, introduced less than a year ago, and was not asked whether I wanted one here. I was merely asked whether I wanted my street to be included in the one that was going to be introduced anyway. Obviously I did not want my street to be the only one in the middle of the zone not included, for then it would have become a commuters' car park. So Councillor [X] will say I voted in favour, although I made it clear in my reply that I did not want it, but that - as it was already decided that there would be one - I did not want my road excluded." ( Professor John Cohn in a letter published in the Hendon & Finchley Times, 18 March 2004, page 14.)
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