Power tends to protect itself merely to maintain its own status and control. Principle gives up power for the sake of creating the best public policy.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Power focuses on self-preservation; principle focuses on making ideas successful.
The whole purpose of maintaining your power in government is to make sure that you stay in government. You stay in government by finding out who is liable to be against you. To do that, you try and put your finger into every single pie that is available to you.
The power to prevent violence is a power that no police force seems to have anywhere in the United States.
If principles don't determine what you are going to pass or do, then power will.
If the large power voluntarily abstains from using its full power or feels the strategic situation to be such that it cannot do so, it in effect loses the advantage of being a big power.
A fundamental duty of government is to protect its people.
The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.
Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
It is a universal and fundamental political principle that the power to protect can safely be confided only to those interested in protecting, or their responsible agents - a maxim not less true in private than in public affairs.