Quotes About Power

AT EVERY POINT on their journey, the new King and Queen were greeted with thunderous cheers. As their ship sailed from Portsmouth, it was flanked by 15 vessels of the Royal Navy's Home Fleet—mighty ships with names to match: Indefatigable, Invincible, Indomitable, Superb.

I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a War of defence, has now become a War of aggression and conquest. The letter writer, Second Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon, had just published a much-praised book of war poems.

But there was something foxlike about the manner in which this constitutional monarch of a small, increasingly democratic country became the totalitarian ruler of a vast empire on another continent. Stealth and dissembling would be his trusted devices, just as the fox relies on these qualities to survive in a world of hunters and larger beasts.

two white men were put on trial for a particularly gruesome set of murders in the French Congo; to celebrate Bastille Day, one had exploded a stick of dynamite in a black prisoner's rectum. Copying

When Leopold turned over his colony to Belgium he burned all the state records, declaring, 'I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there.') Truly, this is the aching heart of the story: how a population comprised of millions of souls, spread over nearly a million square miles, rich in language and music and deeply honored traditions, can be muted and erased.

several children had laughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all the servant boys in town be given fifty lashes. The second installment of twenty-five lashes was due at six o'clock the next morning. Lefranc managed to get these stopped, but was told not to make any more protests that interfered with discipline.

For him, colonies existed for one purpose: to make him and his country rich. "Belgium doesn't exploit the world," he complained to one of his advisers. "It's a taste we have got to make her learn.

Someone once tried to compliment Leopold by saying that he would make "an excellent president of a republic." Scornfully, he turned to his faithful court physician, Jules Thiriar, and asked, "What would you say, Doctor, if someone greeted you as 'a great veterinarian'?" The ruler of a colony would have no parliament to worry about.

Right-wing TV networks did not exist in 1917, but in that year was born a presidential tool even more powerful, a lavishly financed government propaganda agency that operated in every medium of the day: films, books, posters, newspaper articles, and a corps of 75,000 speakers who gave more than seven million talks everywhere from movie houses to revival tents. In addition, the federal government also attacked the press, both during and well after the First World War.

of white men they are branded with a red-hot

As Sanford saw his inherited fortune draining away, his connections at the Belgian court loomed larger for him.

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

Of the riches Leopold hoped to find in the Congo, the one that gleamed most brightly in his imagination was ivory.

During that long span of time, then, Jewish history would have to be written in other ways. It would become the story not of power, but of ideas and beliefs. And its most important turning points would not be the winning of wars or the building of monuments, but the writing of books.

Do you, like Agamemnon, attempt to dominate your world?

We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth, and Achilles is not some new kind of existentialist hero. It is the oldest truth of all, surviving uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and overkings, diplomacy and accommodation, the power structures and the proliferation of stuff which the Mediterranean world provides.

you know what doesn't work when people are tasering you? It's shouting 'Stop tasering me.' If they're tasering you already, they won't stop because you ask them to.

Control was the basis of all humor. Even at its most innocent, what was a joke or a clever comment if not a way to take control? To become King of the Moment.

Who wants a leader who wants to be leader? And I could see his point there. I've always sort of thought we ought to keep a close eye on anyone who wants power over others.

Are we slaves or masters of our genes? We are neither, and it's a dumb, simplistic question.

Anti-Semitism is one of the only forms of racial bigotry that punches upwards to perceived power

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

To superficial minds, the vices of the great seem at all times agreeable.