George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer
Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)
“Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government”
Source: The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book V, Chapter I, Part III, p. 862.
Context: Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.
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Adam Smith175
Scottish moral philosopher and political economist 1723–1790Related quotes
Patrick Henry (1736–1799) attorney, planter, politician and Founding Father of the United States
As quoted in The Best Liberal Quotes Ever : Why the Left is Right (2004) by William P. Martin. Though widely attributed to Henry, this statement has not been sourced to any document before the 1990s and appears to be at odds with his beliefs as a strong opponent of the adoption of the US Constitution.
Misattributed
“Governments, by their nature, are instruments of privilege.”
Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman
Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, “Unlimited Government” (Dec. 29, 1961).
Ivar Ekeland (1944) French mathematician
Introduction, p. 1.
The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006)
Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman
Source: A Way to Be Free: The Autobiography of Robert LeFevre, Volume I, (1999), p. 136
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer
On Publicity http://books.google.com/books?id=AusJAAAAIAAJ&q="Secresy+is+an+instrument+of+conspiracy+it+ought+not+therefore+to+be+the+system+of+a+regular+government"&pg=PA315#v=onepage from The Works of Jeremy Bentham volume 2, part 2 (1839)
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
First attributed to Jefferson in 1945, this does not appear in any known Jefferson document. When governments fear the people, there is liberty... http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/When_governments_fear_the_people,_there_is_liberty...(Quotation), Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. It first appears in 1914, in [Barnhill, John Basil, John Basil Barnhill, Indictment of Socialism No. 3, Barnhill-Tichenor Debate on Socialism, http://debs.indstate.edu/b262b3_1914.pdf, PDF, 2008-10-16, 1914, National Rip-Saw Publishing, Saint Louis, Missouri, p. 34] <br class="br">Misattributed <br class="br">Variant: Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty.
“Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.”
Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country
A Man Without a Country (2005)
Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher
(1847)