על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ד ל״הOn the Special Laws, Book IV 35
א׳
1[183] The law lays upon anyone who has undertaken to superintend and preside over public affairs a very just prohibition when it forbids him “to walk with fraud among the people,” for such conduct shows an illiberal and thoroughly slavish soul which disguises its malignant ways with hypocrisy.
ב׳
2[184] The ruler should preside over his subjects as a father over his children so that he himself may be honoured in return as by true-born sons, and therefore good rulers may be truly called the parents of states and nations in common, since they show a fatherly and sometimes more than fatherly affection.
ג׳
3[185] But those who assume great power to destroy and injure their subjects should be called not rulers but enemies acting like foemen in bitter war, though indeed those who do wrong craftily are more wicked than open adversaries. These last show their hostility stripped naked and it is easy to make defence against them; the villainy of the others is hard to catch or trace since they assume a strange garb as in a theatre to hide their true appearance.
ד׳
4[186] Now “rule” or “command” is a category which extends and intrudes itself, I might almost say, into every branch of life, differing only in magnitude and amount. For the relation of a king to a state is the same as that of a headman to a village, of a householder to a house, of a physician to his patients, of a general to an army, of an admiral to the marines and crews, or again of a skipper to merchant and cargo vessels or of a pilot to the seamen. All these have power both for good and for worse, but they ought to will the better, and the better is to benefit instead of injuring as many as they possibly can.
ה׳
5[187] For this is to follow God since He too can do both but wills the good only. This was shown both in the creation and in the ordering of the world. He called the non-existent into existence and produced order from disorder, qualities from things devoid of quality, similarities from dissimilars, identities from the totally different, fellowship and harmony from the dissociated and discordant, equality from inequality and light from darkness. For He and His beneficent powers ever make it their business to transmute the faultiness of the worse wherever it exists and convert it to the better.