"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism..." - Quote by Thomas Jefferson
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
More by Thomas Jefferson
“The only true corrective of Constitutional abuses is education.”
“The tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion.”
“Old heads as well as young may sometimes be charged with ignorance and presumption. The natural course of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.”
More on Liberty
“The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.”
“Remember, officers and soldiers, that you are fighting for the blessings of liberty.”
“The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.”
More on Despotism
“Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.”
“You do not know the unfathomable cowardice of humanity...servile in the face of force, pitiless in the face of weakness, implacable before blunders, indulgent before crimes...and patient to the point of martyrdom before all the violences of bold despotism.”
“What astonishing changes a few years are capable of producing! I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror. From thinking proceeds speaking, thence to acting is often but a single step. But how irrevocable and tremendous! What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and falacious! Would to God that wise measures may be taken in time to avert the consequences we have but too much reason to apprehend.”