Emergency does not create power.  Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved.  The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency.  Its grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the powerof the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature and that power, whether vested in many or in few, is ever grasping, and, like the grave, cries, “Give, give.”

Unless we rely on God's power within us, we will yield to the pressures around us.

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, can never willingly abandon it.

The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked, and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide.

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.

The danger inherent in reform is that the cure may be worse than the disease…reformers are not on guard against unpredictable side effects which may divert the course of reform toward unwanted results. Moreover, quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.

We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.