Power [is] always sincerely, conscientiously de tres foi [in very good faith] and believes itself right. Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service, when it is violating all his laws.
John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson (1816)1
∵
1
John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, February 2, 1816, in The Adams Jefferson Letters, ed. Leston J. Cappon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 482, amended by Reinhold Niebuhr, Irony in American History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), 21. Original date of publication 1952.