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. All political power is a trust.

42. I will have you removed if you don't stop. I have a little system of my own.

43. The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted.

44. Did we not aid the grisly Taliban to achieve and hold power? Yes indeed 'we' did. Well, does that not double or triple our responsibility to remove them from power?

45. The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.

46. If we have nothing to do but service our own pleasure - because society has taught us that's all we're worth and we're exiled from positions of authority from which we could actually shape society - then we just become hedonists. Eventually, despite how great it may look on Saturday night, come Monday morning there's just purposelessness.

47. Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere.

48. People may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they'll join your side.

49. In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development.

50. All men would be tyrants if they could.

51. Beauty like hers is genius.

52. President Bush has said that he does not need approval from the UN to wage war, and I'm thinking, well, hell, he didn't need the approval of the American voters to become president, either.

53. The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

54. Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.

55. Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.

56. Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.

57. Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.

58. If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

59. If a person, in a position of authority, wants someone to believe a lie, usually all they have to do is tell it to them. If they want someone to believe a ridiculous lie, all they have to do is tell it to them enough.

60. My government currently runs things only because the people 'allow' them to run things. It is my responsibility that I do everything I can to keep tabs on my government, keep them honest and make sure that they always act for the good of the people. They must be reminded that they hold no power over the people that the people do not wish for them to hold. If the government begins working in a way that the people don't agree with, they must be made to know that we will rip it to its very foundations and replace it with something that does.

61. The ability of a country to wage war is not an accurate measure of its strengths, but of its fears.

62. Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

63. This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

64. All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

65. It is with literature as with law or empire - an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.

66. A successful artist of any kind has to work so hard that she is justified in refusing to lay down her sceptre until she is placed on the bier.

67. Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

68. The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

69. The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.

70. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

71. Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

72. All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.

73. In their nomination to office they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function.

74. If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

75. Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar.

76. When you come to analyze the love of money which was the general impulse to effort in your day, you find that the dread of want and desire of luxury was but one of several motives which the pursuit of money represented; the others, and with many the more influential, being desire of power, of social position, and reputation for ability and success.

77. Ambition! powerful source of good and ill!

78. All the gods are dead except the god of war.

79. Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not getting the TV?

80. The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.

81. It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power - power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.

82. The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.

83. You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

84. It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.

85. The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.

86. To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.

87. The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.

88. Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.

89. I can never forget that one of the most gifted, best educated nations in the world, of its own free will, surrendered its fate into the hands of a maniac.

90. Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

91. People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.

92. The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

93. There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.

94. Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

95. The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

96. As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.

97. The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

98. As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.

99. Oppression is the essence of power.

100. He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.