On the Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument (1843)
Context: Standing armies are the oppressive instruments for governing the people, in the hands of hereditary and arbitrary monarchs. A military republic, a government founded on mock elections and supported only by the sword, is a movement indeed, but a retrograde and disastrous movement, from the regular and old-fashioned monarchical systems. If men would enjoy the blessings of republican government, they must govern themselves by reason, by mutual counsel and consultation, by a sense and feeling of general interest, and by the acquiescence of the minority in the will of the majority, properly expressed; and, above all, the military must be kept, according to the language of our Bill of Rights, in strict subordination to the civil authority.
“The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.”
"Beyond Action and Reaction".
The Art of Being Ruled (1926)
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Wyndham Lewis 15
writer and painter 1882–1957Related quotes
Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book III, On Consumption, Chapter I, note 2
Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (2013), p. 106
1790s, Farewell Address (1796)
Context: The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish Government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established Government.
Nationally syndicated column number 31, A Few Shots of Scopolamin (15 July 1923), after meeting Robert E. House, who had proposed the use of scopolamine as a truth serum, in The Use of Scopolamine in Criminology (1922).
Weekly columns
Context: See they conducted experiments on convicts... I don't know on what grounds they reason a man in jail is a bigger liar than one out of jail... The chances are telling the truth is what got him there... It would be a big aid to humanity, but it will never be, for already the politicians are up in arms against it... It would wreck the very foundation on which our political government is run... If you ever injected truth into politics you'd have no politics … Even the ministers are denouncing it now … Humanity is not yet ready for either real truth or real harmony.
"The Farmer as a Conservationist" [1939]; Published in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (eds.) 1991, p. 259.
1930s
Letter from Jamaica (Summer 1815)
Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Organization," 1948, p. 25