If those to whom power is delegated do well, they will be respected: if not, they will be despised; and with regard to those to whom no power is delegated, but who assume it, the rational world can know nothing of them.
From "Rights of Man," Paine outlines the conditions for legitimate authority, emphasizing accountability for delegated power and rejecting assumed power.
Share
More from Thomas Paine
The insulted German and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole, are beginning to think.
Discussion and the general will arbitrates the question, and to this, private opinion yields with a good grace, and order is preserved uninterrupted.
As soldiers have hitherto been treated in most countries, they might be said to be without a friend.
There is, therefore, no power but the voluntary will of the people that has a right to act in any matter respecting a general reform; and by the same right that two persons can confer on such a subject, a thousand may.