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Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.

— Guy de Maupassant Sur l’eau (1888)

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Government

More quotes by Guy de Maupassant

In the East men know panic, but they do not know what fright is.

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

Legitimized love always despises its easygoing brother.

Boule de Suif (1880)

A legal kiss is never as good as a stolen one.

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.

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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: Guy de Maupassant (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.