Quotes About Power

La conquista de la tierra, que por lo general consiste en arrebatársela a quienes tienen una tez de color distinto o narices ligeramente más chatas que las nuestras, no es nada agradable cuando se observa con atención. Lo

It seems that the savage autocracy, any more than the divine democracy, does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies. It devours its friends and servants as well.

Had you been the Emperor of the East and West, you could not have ignored your inferiority in his presence.

No wonder there are bandits in the Campo when there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary macaques to rule us...

I have the means to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the means. That's their impression. It's absolute. Therefore I am deadly.

Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-mad might as if indifferent to heaven's frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer of the world's light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough there to bury five millions of lives.

Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-made might as if indifferent to heaven's frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer of the world's light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough there to bury five millions of lives.

History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads.

efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.

He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might as of a deity,' and so on, and so on.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

There is death in the folds of her skirt and blood about her feet. She is for no man.

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work, and Brown, as though he had been really great, had a satanic gift of finding out the best and the weakest spot in his victims.

don't in the least understand why men can't live without wars.

The real evils, indeed, of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments.

Brutus and Cassius howl in Hell together

a fuerza no es sino una casualidad nacida de la debilidad de los otros.

Both these white men looked on native life as a mere play of shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race could walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its incomprehensible aims and needs.

not by gunpowder but by those who invented it would matters be settled.

a character exposed to those strongest of all influences: the intrigues, flattery, and self-deception inseparable from power;

The next gust seemed to blow all this away. The air was full of flying water. There was a fierce purpose in the gale, a furious earnestness in the screech of the wind, in the brutal tumult of earth and sky, that seemed directed at him, and made him hold his breath in awe. He stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled around.

How can we fight the French, Prince? said Count Rostopchin. Can we arm ourselves against our teachers and divinities?

The mind of man is capable of anything." ? Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary