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"Federalists and anti-federalists both agreed that man in his deepest nature was selfish and corrupt; that blind ambition most often overcomes even the most clear-eyed rationality; and that the lust for power was so overwhelming that no one should ever be trusted with unqualified authority. The difference between the two parties lay in the conclusion they reached with respect to the extent and power of a central government. Because the anti-federalists saw corruption and the lust for power everywhere, they argued that the weaker the power available, the less harm the manipulation of power could do. The federalists argued that the problem in the American situation had been exaggerated. Yes, people were innately evil and self-seeking, and yes, no one could be trusted with unconfined power. That was as true in America as anywhere else. But under the Constitution's checks and balances power would be far from unconfined, and for such a self-limiting system there would be virtue enough for success." Bernard Bailyn   "The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated—a system of checks and balances. By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement." Milton Friedman   "The Machiavellians are the only ones who have told us the full truth about power. Other writers have at most told the truth only about groups other than the ones for which they themselves speak. The Machiavellians present the complete record: the primary object, in practice, of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. There are no exceptions. No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of good will, no religion will restrain power. Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leader nor businessmen, neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of power. Individual saints, exempt in individual intention from the law of power, will nevertheless be always bound to it through the disciples, associates, and followers to whom they cannot, in organized social life, avoid being tied." James Burnham   "We deplore the visible assertion of military power when it breaks the peace but we praise the quiet assertion of military power when it keeps the peace. We forget that if war is immoral, the prizes of victory—whether territory or reparations or prestige or political power—are also immoral. As the highest prize of victory is enhanced international power, and as that power is often utilised by the victor to protect its own interests throughout the subsequent period of peace, the peace can hardly be called righteous. The character and conditions of peace, unfortunately, are concealed beneath rhetoric and a facade of morality. Though the methods and morality which initiated a war were virtually the same as those which ended a war, the one was declared immoral and the other was declared moral." Geoffrey Blainey   "'In the end people believe that if the state power were completely in their hands they could fashion a new existence.' The masses join forces with the dynamic power of commercial society, 'big business,' industry, and the thirst for 'property and money-making.' Business turns to the power of the state to protect and extend its interests, while the masses want the state to provide the benefits they cannot acquire on their own. From these twin pressures the all-powerful modern state emerges, along with its new power wielders. Burckhardt saw in France's Napoleon III an example of the archetypal rulers of the future: 'the terrible simplifiers' as he called them, military dictators and their henchmen who reduce the fragile complexity of human experience to the single reality of power. The masses learn to acquiesce. 'They want their peace and pay,' Burckhardt wrote sardonically, and will accept them from whatever political form will deliver, even if it means a 'long, voluntary servitude' to a brutal dictatorship." Arthur Herman   "The 'people' who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the 'self-government' spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority: the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power. The limitation, therefore, of the power of government over individuals, loses none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that is, to the strongest party therein." John Stuart Mill   "Mining the uranium for nuclear energy leaves a far smaller environmental scar than mining coal, oil, or gas, and the power plants themselves take up about one five-hundredth of the land needed by wind or solar. Nuclear energy is available around the clock, and it can be plugged into power grids that provide concentrated energy where it is needed. It has a lower carbon footprint than solar, hydro, and biomass, and it's safer than them, too. The sixty years with nuclear power have seen thirty-one deaths in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the result of extraordinary Soviet-era bungling, together with a few thousand early deaths from cancer above the 100,000 natural cancer deaths in the exposed population. The other two famous accidents, at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Fukushima in 2011, killed no one. Yet vast numbers of people are killed day in, day out by the pollution from burning combustibles and by accidents in mining and transporting them, none of which make headlines. Compared with nuclear power, natural gas kills 38 times as many people per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, biomass 63 times as many, petroleum 243 times as many, and coal 387 times as many—perhaps a million deaths a year." Steven Pinker   "Trilling modestly asks whether it might not be better for students to know something, 'almost anything that has nothing to do with the talkative and attitudinizing present.' He even suggests, in his polite, rather formal way, that it is possible in the university to confront 'the power of a work of art fully and courageously,' and even to 'discover and disclose power where it has not been felt before,' especially if that power has been concealed by the very fact of the work's having become 'a classic,' and by the other fact that its relation to immediate modern problems, as formulated by philosophy, sociology, and politics, is not immediate, not 'relevant.' No wonder Trilling is nowadays rarely referred to; in the modern world of academic criticism there is no leisure for discovering the answers to his questions, which are concerned with teaching in its relation to a much wider area of culture." Frank Kermode   "It's no wonder many environmentalists are conflicted: the zero-carbon energy sources they demand can take a terrible toll on the wildlife and open spaces they love. California's iconic Altamont Pass wind farm, for example, kills thousands of birds yearly, including an estimated 75 to 110 golden eagles. Solar farms threaten endangered desert tortoises and other wildlife. Because of their low energy density, wind and solar developments require enormous tracts of land, compared with other energy sources. New York's now-shuttered Indian Point nuclear power plant sits on just 240 acres. Replacing its power entirely with wind power would require more than 500 square miles of turbines. That's a massive amount of land and habitat lost to energy production." James Meigs   "In republics, such as those established in America, the sovereign power, or the power over which there is no control, and which controls all others, remains where nature placed it—in the people; for the people of America are the fountain of power." Tom Paine   "That Adolf Hitler has 'conquered power' and 'fought through to victory,' as the nationalist myth claims and the National Socialist torchbearers imagine, is a little historical lie. Herr Hitler was already a defeated man when victory was gifted to him. His play for power had already failed when he was offered the opportunity to gain it by the back door. It wasn't a march on Berlin that brought the German Mussolini to power, but a piece of chicanery by the camarilla of Prussian Junkers and Westphalian industrialists." Leopold Schwarzschild   "The most absolute authority, wrote Rousseau, 'is that which penetrates into a man's inmost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions.' The truth of that observation is in no way lessened by the fact that for Rousseau genuinely legitimate government, government based upon the general will, should so penetrate. Rousseau saw correctly that the kind of power traditionally exercised by kings and princes, represented chiefly by the tax collector and the military, was in fact a very weak kind of power compared with what a philosophy of government resting on the general will could bring about. Tocqueville, from a vastly different philosophy of the state, also took note of the kind of power Rousseau described. 'It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in the great things than in the little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without the other.'" Robert Nisbet   "Power confers the ability of gratifying our desire without the consent of others. Wealth enables us to obtain the consent of others to our gratification. Power, simply considered, whatever it confers on one, must take from another. Wealth enables its owner to give to others, by taking only from himself. Power pleases the violent and proud: wealth delights the placid and the timorous." Samuel Johnson   "The Führer emphasized that (1) it would be best to do without tax increases during the war and instead to impose levies on wartime profits afterward, (2) if taxes must be raised during the war, then only income tax, maintaining a deductible of 6,000 marks, (3) limiting spending power: the Führer repeatedly stressed that wealthy people's income has little effect on purchasing power. The only prices that rise are those on art objects and the like, and that is completely harmless. The spending power of the broad masses is what's important! It is directed toward procuring everyday necessities: food, clothing, etc." Martin Bormann   "The Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010 killed 11 rig workers. The fiery wreck of a train hauling crude oil killed 47 residents of a small town in Quebec in 2013. As recently as 2011, the American Lung Association estimated that pollution from coal-fired power plants killed roughly 13,000 Americans each year. Against those numbers, nuclear power's safety record is comparatively pristine. In the US, more workers have died falling off rooftops while installing solar panels than in the entire history of commercial nuclear power." James Meigs   "We have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people's government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people." Franklin Roosevelt   "In 1610 Hedley appealed to the concept of the balanced constitution, or, as he put it, 'this so ancient, honourable and happy state, so prudently compact of the sovereignty of the king and the liberty of the subject.' But he made it plain that the subject's property rights were superior to royal power. Wealthy subjects made for a powerful king. If it were 'in the king's absolute power' to take his subjects' property, they would have no incentive to gather wealth. So royal power depended on the inviolability of private property. 'This ancient liberty of the subject in England is that which doth and always hath maintained and upholden the sovereignty of the king.' 'The riches of the subject,' argued Fuller in the same Parliament, 'is the best treasure of the king,' and he cited James's Basilicon Doron to confirm the point. So the individual had 'an absolute property in his goods by the rule of law.' Sir Edward Coke appealed to this set of ideas in 1621, stressing the importance of restoring 'the subjects libertie, which is the Kings wealth. For nothing can be good for the Kinge that is ill for the subject.'" Johann Sommerville   "It is somewhat odd that great theorists of democracy and great adversaries of this Platonic theory—such as Rousseau—adopted Plato's statement of the problem instead of rejecting it as inadequate, for it is quite clear that the fundamental question in political theory is not the one Plato formulated. The question is not 'Who should rule?' or 'Who is to have power?' but 'How much power should be granted to the government?' or perhaps more precisely, 'How can we develop our political institutions in such a manner that even incompetent and dishonest rulers cannot do too much harm?' In other words, the fundamental problem of political theory is the problem of checks and balances, of institutions by which political power, its arbitrariness and its abuse can be controlled and tamed." Karl Popper   "To some people, 'government' appears as a vast reservoir of powers which inspires them to dream of what use might be made of it. They have favourite projects, of various dimensions, which they sincerely believe are for the benefit of mankind, and to capture this source of power, if necessary to increase it, and to use it for imposing their favourite projects upon their fellows is what they understand as the adventure of governing men. They are thus disposed to recognize government as an instrument of passion; the art of politics is to inflame and direct desire. In short, governing is understood to be just like any other activity—making and selling a brand of soap, exploiting the resources of a locality, or developing a housing estate—only the power here is (for the most part) already mobilized, and the enterprise is remarkable only because it aims at monopoly and because of its promise of success once the source of power has been captured." Michael Oakeshott   "Two centuries later, our economic power and military might have grown beyond anything that our forefathers could have imagined. But that power and might can only be sustained and renewed if we can regain our authority with the world, the authority not simply of a large and wealthy nation but of the American idea. If we can live up to that idea, if we can exercise our power wisely and well, we can make America great again." Hillary Clinton