The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Mistrust the man who finds everything good; the man who find everything evil; and more the man who is indifferent to everything.

But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

The one man to distrust, however, is the man who never makes a mistake, never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do. He is either a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.

It is in human nature to respect power; but all his
manliness was at stake, and his natural rights would be degraded and lost, if he could not show his power to be greater than her own.

But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had — power.

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.

Do not trust all men, but trust men of worth; the former course is silly, the latter a mark of prudence.

if you shall seem to some to be a person of importance, distrust yourself.

When a man is set in authority over others, everything conspires to rob him of his sense of justice and reason.

Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.

In order to be fully convinced of this, we must take an extensive view of the subject; and the first inquiry should be, what kind of beings men are? You and I admire the fable of Tristram Shandy more than the fable of the Bees, and agree with Butler rather than Hobbes. It is weakness rather than wickedness, which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power.

power that isn’t really justified by the will of the governed should be dismantled.