Paine on accountability

A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.
- Thomas Paine

Paine wrote this as part of his treatise The Rights of Man, attacking the French aristocracy and defending the revolution. Couldn't be more apt to 2025.

He goes on to observe that "aristocracy is kept up by family tyranny and injustice," and that "their ideas of distributive justice are corrupted at the very source." Aristocracy he says "has a tendency to deteriorate the human species," and that the "greatest characters the world have known have arisen on the democratic floor."