
“A despotic power makes slaves.”
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)
Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon's War Maxims: With His Social and Political Thoughts (1804-15), Gale & Polden, (1899) p. 150
“A despotic power makes slaves.”
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)
Variant translation: Trade is the natural enemy of all violent passions. Trade loves moderation, delights in compromise, and is most careful to avoid anger. It is patient, supple, and insinuating, only resorting to extreme measures in cases of absolute necessity. Trade makes men independent of one another and gives them a high idea of their personal importance: it leads them to want to manage their own affairs and teaches them to succeed therein. Hence it makes them inclined to liberty but disinclined to revolution.
Book Three, Chapter XXI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Three
The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, Vol. I (1769), Sect. I, p. 81
the option to raise children, or to not take a hazardous job
Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 11.
Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 4, "Magelight" (Arren and Ged)
No. 13
1790s, Discourses on Davila (1790)
Context: Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist. But if unlimited or unbalanced power of disposing property, be put into the hands of those who have no property, France will find, as we have found, the lamb committed to the custody of the wolf. In such a case, all the pathetic exhortations and addresses of the national assembly to the people, to respect property, will be regarded no more than the warbles of the songsters of the forest. The great art of law-giving consists in balancing the poor against the rich in the legislature, and in constituting the legislative a perfect balance against the executive power, at the same time that no individual or party can become its rival. The essence of a free government consists in an effectual control of rivalries. The executive and the legislative powers are natural rivals; and if each has not an effectual control over the other, the weaker will ever be the lamb in the paws of the wolf. The nation which will not adopt an equilibrium of power must adopt a despotism. There is no other alternative. Rivalries must be controlled, or they will throw all things into confusion; and there is nothing but despotism or a balance of power which can control them.
The History of Freedom in Christianity (1877)
Context: In the height of their power the Romans became aware of a race of men that had not abdicated freedom in the hands of a monarch; and the ablest writer of the empire pointed to them with a vague and bitter feeling that, to the institutions of these barbarians, not yet crushed by despotism, the future of the world belonged. Their kings, when they had kings, did not preside [at] their councils; they were sometimes elective; they were sometimes deposed; and they were bound by oath to act in obedience to the general wish. They enjoyed real authority only in war. This primitive Republicanism, which admits monarchy as an occasional incident, but holds fast to the collective supremacy of all free men, of the constituent authority over all constituted authorities, is the remote germ of parliamentary government.
Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)
Source: Survivals and New Arrivals (1929), Ch. III Survivals (iii) The "Wealth and Power" Argument