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Keep a government poor and weak and it's your servant; when it is rich and powerful it becomes your master.

— H. Beam Piper Colonel Andrew Jackson Hickock in Lone Star Planet (1958)

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Government

More quotes by H. Beam Piper

Politics is nothing but common action to secure more favorable living conditions.

The Complete Paratime (1947)

A planet could take pretty good care of itself, he thought, if people would only leave it alone.

The Complete Paratime (1947)

For each man the world ends when he dies.

The Complete Paratime (1947)

Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer.

A Slave is a Slave (1962)

“Bad luck!” Brannad Klav snorted. “That’s the standing excuse of every incompetent!”

The Complete Paratime (1947)

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