Ioannis Williams

“Having collected and studied, with his students, 158 Greek constitutions, Aristotle divided them into three types: monarchy, aristocracy, and timocracy-government respectively by power, by birth, and by excellence. Anyone of these forms may be good according to time, place, and circumstance. "Though one form of government may be better than others," reads a sentence which every American should memorize, "yet there is no reason to prevent another from being preferable to it under particular conditions." .... Each form of government is good when the ruling power seeks the good of all rather than its own profit; in the contrary case each is bad. Each type, therefore, has a degenerate analogue when it becomes government for the governors instead of for the governed; then monarchy lapses into despotism, aristocracy into oligarchy, timocracy into democracy in the sense of rule by the common man." When the single ruler is good and able, monarchy is the best form of government; when he is a selfish autocrat we have tyranny, which is the worst form of government.”
― Will Durant, Story of Civilization

“In the vast profusion of good things upon this earth I should seek what I like best, and what I can best appropriate to myself.
To this end, the first use I should make of my wealth would be to purchase leisure and freedom, to which I would add health, if it were to be purchased; but health can only be bought by temperance, and as there is no real pleasure without health, I should be temperate from sensual motives.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“Every growing civilization is a scene of multiplying inequalities; the natural differences of human endowment unite with differences of opportunity to produce artificial differences of wealth and power; and where no laws or despots suppress these artificial inequalities they reach at last a bursting point where the poor have nothing to lose by violence, and the chaos of revolution levels men again into a community of destitution. ... Then the race for wealth, goods and power begins again, and the pyramid of ability takes form once more; under whatever laws may be enacted the abler man manages somehow to get the richer soil, the better place, the lion’s share; soon he is strong enough to dominate the state and rewrite or interpret the laws; and in time the inequality is as great as before.”
― Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage

“Now, he didn't always get away with things: at the time when the whites were busy slaughtering the Indians, there was one Indian tribe who thought, 'what the hell, let's hire lawyers'. So they did. The Cherokees hired the best team of New York lawyers they could find to declare Jackson's behavior unconstitutional in trying to drive them off their lands.--I am, by the way, 1/64th Cherokee; if I get a nosebleed I lose my membership in the tribe, but, in any case, this is a fact about us Cherokees)--we won the legal case, and Jackson said to Marshall, 'ok'--he said--'you've made your decision, now try to enforce it'. Ah, so, he couldn't enforce it, and the army just continued to massacre the Cherokees and drive them out of their lands to Oklahoma.”
― John R. Searle