Selected power quotes

1. Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.

2. The whole Constitution has been erected upon the assumption that the King not only is capable of doing wrong but is more likely to do wrong than other men if he is given the chance.

3. The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

4. Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

5. But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. 'Might makes right,' and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.

6. Remain strong in your faith, as you were in former years. In this faith, in its close-knit unity our people to-day goes straight forward on its way and no power on earth will avail to stop it.

7. The National Socialist Movement has wrought this miracle. If Almighty God granted success to this work, then the Party was His instrument.

8. I have not come into this world to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses.

9. Politics is history in the making.

10. When our party had only seven men, it already had two principles. First, it wanted to be a party with a true ideology. And second, it wanted to be the one and only power in Germany.

11. It is not the State that orders us; but it is we who order the State!

12. I have been Europe's last hope. She proved incapable of refashioning herself by means of voluntary reform. She showed herself impervious to charm and persuasion. To take her I had to use violence. (26th February)

13. With the defeat of the Reich and pending the emergence of the Asiatic, the African and, perhaps, the South American nationalisms, there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other-the United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will compel these two Powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology. (2nd April 1945)

14. What luck for rulers that men do not think.

15. You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

16. You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.

17. The heart of government, coated with whatever velvet gloves you want to put on it, is a mailed fist of force and coercion.

18. We must reject dictatorship in whatever form it takes--and especially when it rears its head in our own midst on the bench.

19. Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead.

20. We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.

21. All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

22. Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.

23. Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.

24. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

25. One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.

26. Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

27. The nation that secures control of the air will ultimately control the world.

28. The striving for significance, this sense of yearning, always points out to us that all psychological phenomena contain a movement that starts from a feeling of inferiority and reach upward. The theory of Individual Psychology of psychological compensation states that the stronger the feeling of inferiority, the higher the goal for personal power.

29. Going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful.

30. These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.

31. It was settled by the Constitution, the laws, and the whole practice of the government that the entire executive power is vested in the President of the United States.

32. No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody.

33. Any president can start a war, and use the chaos of disorder that such a war creates as an indefinite argument for prolonging it. It's a war that keeps on giving. Failure means it's even more necessary to keep failing.

34. When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.

35. We stole their babes and mothers, chiefs and braves Although we held the whip, you knew we were The real slaves To alchemy, human alchemy.

36. We were terrified that Jones would settle. It was contrary to our purpose of bringing down the president.

37. This is the way addled liberals really think. Even as they champion sucking the brains out of little babies, they think of themselves as indelibly compassionate because they favor an overweening, behemoth federal government.

38. They should rule who are able to rule best.

39. Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.

40. Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.

41. The world is ready to give up its secrets if we only know how to knock, how to give it the necessary blow. The strength and force of the blow come through concentration.

42. We came to enjoy; we are being enjoyed. We came to rule; we are being ruled. We came to work; we are being worked. All the time, we find that. And this comes into every detail of our life.

43. Great empires are not maintained by timidity.

44. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot. Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly - I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads - The allotment of death.

45. The violent have been victorious for most of history because they kindled the fear with which everyone is born.

46. France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

47. To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.

48. Daughter of Jove, relentless power, Thou tamer of the human breast, Whose iron scourge and tort'ring hour The bad affright, afflict the best!

49. To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.

50. As in the presence of the Master, the Servants are equall, and without any honour at all; So are the Subjects, in the presence of the Soveraign. And though they shine some more, some lesse, when they are out of his sight; yet in his presence, they shine no more than the Starres in presence of the Sun.

51. History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

52. In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.

53. The idea of creating a national bank I do not concur in, because it seems now decided that Congress has not that power (although I sincerely wish they had it exclusively), and because I think there is already a vast redundancy rather than a scarcity of paper medium.

54. The monopoly of a single bank is certainly an evil. The multiplication of them was intended to cure it; but it multiplied an influence of the same character with the first, and completed the supplanting the precious metals by a paper circulation. Between such parties the less we meddle the better.

55. Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.

56. As I am never better than when I am mad; then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders: but reason abuseth me, and there's the torment, there's the hell.

57. Yeah, the world would swing if I were king. Can I help it if I still dream time to time?

58. Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

59. The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

60. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

61. Workers are not going to be fobbed off with a few shares...or by a carbon copy of the German system of co-determination.

62. When we have a majority we will do it. I think the days of the Lords are quite genuinely numbered.

63. The paramount question of the day is not political, is not religious, but is economic. The crying-out demand of today is for a circle of principles that shall forever make it impossible for one man to control another by controlling the means of his existence.

64. Germany, which has lately united 80 million Germans, has submitted certain neighboring countries to her supremacy and gained military strength in many aspects, and thus has become, as clearly can be seen, a dangerous rival to principal imperialistic powers in Europe - England and France. That is why they declared war on Germany on a pretext of fulfilling the obligations given to Poland. It is now clearer than ever, how remote the real aims of the cabinets in these countries were from the interests of defending the now disintegrated Poland or Czechoslovakia.

65. Our scientists all the more occupy advanced positions in the development of world science. By the example of their successes in the field of atomic energy, our scientists and technicians have vividly shown how much the increased might of the Soviet state and the further growth of its international authority depends on their efforts and practical successes.

66. The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

67. The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

68. If I could only write, I'd write a nasty letter to the mayor, if he could only read.

69. A political country is like an American forest; you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them.

70. Nations touch at their summits.

71. The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged.

72. A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.

73. An influential member of parliament has not only to pay much money to become such, and to give time and labour, he has also to sacrifice his mind too - at least all the characteristics part of it that which is original and most his own.

74. Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.

75. In every particular state of the world, those nations which are strongest tend to prevail over the others; and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best.

76. So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.

77. We must not let daylight in upon the magic.

78. The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.

79. From the union of power and money, from the union of power and secrecy, from the union of government and science, from the union of government and art, from the union of science and money, from the union of ambition and ignorance, from the union of genius and war, from the union of outer space and inner vacuity, the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.

80. Maybe it's because I've never been in politics, but I don't believe that America is run by politicians in Washington. I believe it's run by people like us, in places like this.

81. Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing).

82. As things now stand, the office is a slightly meaner battleground than the home. Male bosses seem to dominate their women underlings as they would never dominate their wives.

83. Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.

84. Why did the generals who have been so ready to term me a complaisant and incompetent yes-man fail to secure my removal? Was that all that difficult? No, that wasn't it; the truth was that nobody would have been ready to replace me, because each one knew that he would end up just as much a wreck as I.

85. There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is persecution to others or selfishness.

86. O Winter, ruler of the inverted year!

87. His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.

88. There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.

89. Where there is little or no public opinion, there is likely to be bad government, which sooner or later becomes autocratic government.

90. Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.

91. Women like not only to conquer, but to be conquered.

92. Absolute discretion is a ruthless master. It is more destructive of freedom than any of man's other inventions.

93. One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the First Amendment.

94. It seemed to me that I had barely reached the Court when people were trying to get me off.

95. The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.

96. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.

97. Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.

98. No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.

99. Art is what is irresistible.

100. In truth the prison, unto which we doom Ourselves, no prison is.