"The virtue of democracy is that is has placed limits on the absoluteness of power."
"The Greatest evils inflicted by man over the face of the Earth are wrought not by the self-seekers, the pleasure lovers, or the merely amoral, but by the fervent devotees of ethical principles."
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Source: Robert Morrison MacIver (2005). “Politics and Society”, p.174, Transaction Publishers
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"We are apt to think we know what time is because we can measure it, but no sooner do we reflect upon it than that illusion goes. So it appears that the range of the measureable is not the range of the knowable. There are things we can measure, like time, but yet our minds do not grasp their meaning. There are things we cannot measure, like happiness or pain, and yet their meaning is perfectly clear to us."
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"It is no more the function of government to impose a moral code than to impose a religious code. And for the same reason."