Algernon Sidney
Algernon Sidney
Algernon Sidney or Sydneywas an English politician and member of the Long Parliament. A republican political theorist, colonel, and commissioner of the trial of King Charles I of England, he opposed the king's execution. Sidney was later charged with plotting against Charles II, in part based on his work, Discourses Concerning Government, used by the prosecution as a witness at his trial. He was executed for treason. After his death, Sidney was revered as a "Whig patriot–hero and martyr"...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth14 January 1653
I will believe in the right of one man to govern a nation despotically when I find a man born unto the world with boots and spurs, and a nation with saddles on their backs.
Violence and fraud can create no right.
Who will wear a shoe that hurts him, because the shoe-maker tells him 'tis well made?
Tis hard to comprehend how one man can come to be master of many, equal to himself in right, unless it be by consent or by force.
Fruits are always of the same nature with the seeds and roots from which they come, and trees are known by the fruits they bear: as a man begets a man, and a beast a beast, that society of men which constitutes a government upon the foundation of justice, virtue, and the common good, will always have men to promote those ends; and that which intends the advancement of one man's desire and vanity, will abound in those that will foment them.
All the nations they had to deal with, had the same fate.
[L]iberty cannot be preserved, if the manners of the people are corrupted . . .
Men lived like fishes; the great ones devoured the small.
That is the best Government, which best provides for war.