Quotes About Power

Demagoguery is the ability to dress minor ideas with major words.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

Towering genius...thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen.

If the do has the can, and the ifs possess the butts, then the has can can the can in the if's butt, and the delicate walnut shell that is the universe shall be sundered, and the Prepositional Pronouns will break free from their shackles, and the when's shall rule the world

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

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty's limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one's control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.

The rich and powerful are less likely, all other things being equal, to be arrested, convicted, or imprisoned. The poor are, holding everything else constant, more likely to be incarcerated, institutionalized, and sterilized.

Around the time the Germans were slaughtering Hereros, the world also was largely ignoring America's brutal counterguerrilla war in the Philippines, in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed some 20,000 rebels, and saw an estimated 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease.

Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone's life.

Its monarch, the ManiKongo, was chosen by an assembly of clan leaders. Like his European counterparts, he

There was nothing inherently wrong with colonialism, he felt, if its administration was fair and just. He

Sorry, but they're burning the State archives." The furnaces burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke in the sky over Brussels. "I will give them my Congo," Leopold told Stinglhamber, "but they have no right to know what I did there.

Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl): "Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot. . . . "Signed The Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, von Trotha.

Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. Aldrich, a multimillionaire, a card-playing partner of J. Pierpont Morgan, the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was the ultimate Washington power broker. "I'm just a president," Roosevelt once told the journalist Lincoln Steffens, "and he has seen lots of presidents.

Whenever Mosley was heckled at one of his rallies, he stopped speaking and searchlights focused on the heckler as jackbooted men beat him and then threw him out of the hall.

those who made the greatest fortunes from the Scramble for Africa, like Leopold, were often men who had fortunes to begin with.

In the Congo, as in Russia, mass murder had a momentum of its own. Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone's life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting.

bayonet was a weapon with a worker at each end.

British territory did cover nearly a quarter of the earth.

So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt; so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals were shot that the almost leaderless Red Army was nearly crushed by the German invasion of 1941.

Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone's life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. Congo

He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passersby for target practice. If

When the Atlantic slave trade began decimating the Kongo, that nation was under the reign of a ManiKongo named Nzinga Mbemba Affonso, who had gained the throne in 1506 and ruled as Affonso I for nearly forty years. Affonso's life spanned a crucial period. When he was born, no one in the kingdom knew that Europeans existed.