Despotic governments are jealous, and the subjects prone to rebellion.

Perhaps you will imagine that the man who avows these principles of arbitrary government, and pleads them as the justification of acts which nothing else can justify, is of opinion that they are on the whole good for the people over whom…

He mentions them as horrible things, tending to inflict on the people a thousand evils, and to bring on the ruler a continual train of dangers.

But nothing is more false than that despotism is the constitution of any country in Asia that we are acquainted with.

Here he has declared his opinion, that he is a despotic prince, that he is to use arbitrary power; and of course all his acts are covered with that shield.

No! it will be your pride and glory to teach men intrusted with power, that, in their use of it, they are to conform to principles, and not to draw their principles from the corrupt practice of any man whatever.

My Lords, the East India Company have not arbitrary power to give him; the king has no arbitrary power to give him; your Lordships have not; nor the Commons, nor the whole legislature.

We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give.

No man can lawfully govern himself according to his own will; much less can one person be governed by the will of another.

This great law does not arise from our conventions or compacts; on the contrary, it gives to our conventions and compacts all the force and sanction they can have.

Every good gift is of God; all power is of God; and He who has given the power, and from whom alone it originates, will never suffer the exercise of it to be practised upon any less solid foundation than the power itself.

No conquest can give such a right; for conquest, that is, force, cannot convert its own injustice into a just title, by which it may rule others at its pleasure.

To this at least he is strictly bound: he ought to govern them as he governs his own subjects.

It has been his ambition and his policy to reconcile the vanquished to his fortune, to show that they had gained by the change, to convert their momentary suffering into a long benefit, and to draw from the humiliation of his enemies an…

No, my Lords, this arbitrary power is not to be had by conquest.

Neither by compact, covenant, or submission,--for men cannot covenant themselves out of their rights and their duties,--nor by any other means, can arbitrary power be conveyed to any man.

Those who give to others such rights perform acts that are void as they are given,--good indeed and valid only as tending to subject themselves, and those who act with them, to the Divine displeasure; because morally there can be no such…

Those who give and those who receive arbitrary power are alike criminal; and there is no man but is bound to resist it to the best of his power, wherever it shall show its face to the world.

Nothing but absolute impotence can justify men in not resisting it to the utmost of their ability.

Law and arbitrary power are in eternal enmity.

Name me a magistrate, and I will name property; name me power, and I will name protection.

It is a contradiction in terms, it is blasphemy in religion, it is wickedness in politics, to say that any man can have arbitrary power.

Judges are guided and governed by the eternal laws of justice, to which we are all subject.

We may bite our chains, if we will, but we shall be made to know ourselves, and be taught that man is born to be governed by law; and he that will substitute will in the place of it is an enemy to GOD.

Despotism does not in the smallest degree abrogate, alter, or lessen any one duty of any one relation of life, or weaken the force or obligation of any one engagement or contract whatsoever.