1960s, Special message to Congress on the right to vote (1965)
Context: The essence of our American tradition of State and local governments is the belief expressed by Thomas Jefferson that Government is best which is closest to the people. Yet that belief is betrayed by those State and local officials who engage in denying the right of citizens to vote. Their actions serve only to assure that their State governments and local governments shall be remote from the people, least representative of the people's will and least responsive to the people's wishes.
“Collectivism, as we know, does not abolish wages, though it introduces considerable modifications into the existing order of things. It only substitutes the State, that is to say, Representative Government, national or local, for the individual employer of labor. Under Collectivism it is the representatives of the nation, or of the district, and deputies and officials who are to have the control of industry. It is they who reserve to themselves the right of employing the surplus of production — in the interests of all.”
Source: The Conquest of Bread (1892), Ch. 5 : Food, p. 101
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Peter Kropotkin 141
Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scie… 1842–1921Related quotes
Confessions of a Revolutionary (1849)
Context: It is necessary to have lived in this insulator which is called the national assembly, in order to perceive how the men who are the most completely ignorant of the state of the country are almost always the ones who represent it. I set myself to read everything that the distribution bureau sends the representatives: proposals, reports, brochures, even the Moniteur and the Bulletin of the laws. The greater part of my colleagues of the left and the extreme left were in the same perplexity of spirit, in the same ignorance of the daily facts. The national workshops were spoken of only with a kind of fright; for fear of the people is the defect of all those who belong to authority; the people, as concerns power, is the enemy.
Lenin as Philosopher (1938), Chapter 8
1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)
Source: On the Foreign Policy of the Soviet State
Source: The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929-1941 (1952), p. 484