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To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue.

— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Idée Générale de la Révolution au XIXe Siècle [The General Idea of the Revolution (1851)

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More quotes by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

All men in their hearts, I say, bear witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand it.

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All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.

Philosophy at Work : A Constructive Approach to Philosophy (1960)

To name a thing is easy: the difficulty is to discern it before its appearance.

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As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.

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Talents is a creation of society rather than a gift of nature; it is an accumulated capital of which the recipient is only the guardian.

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Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small.

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene (1589)

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

James Madison

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

John Adams

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.