Quotes About Power

It might be unpalatable in our more egalitarian era to admit it, but Churchill became prime minister by a process that was far from democratic.

Fathers also had the right to have their children imprisoned for disobedience for a month in the case of under-sixteens, and for six months for those between sixteen and twenty-one.

Great men are seldom nice men.

When the mob gains the day, it ceases to be any longer the mob. It is then called the nation. If it does not, why, then some are executed, and they are called the canaille, rebels, thieves and so forth.' Napoleon to Dr Barry O'Meara on St Helena

Hatred plays the same part in Government as acids in chemistry

how little friendship counted at the top of politics

set up to study the tactics and equipment required to defeat Japan, even recommended the use of mustard and phosgene gas against underground enemy positions, and was supported in this by Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur, but it was vetoed by President Roosevelt.

If he lasts a year, he'll go far.' Talleyrand on Napoleon's consulship

am in favour of government of the people, for the people, but not by the people

The men who have changed the world never succeeded by winning over the powerful, but always by stirring the masses. The first method is a resort to intrigue and only brings limited results. The latter is the course of genius and changes the face of the world.' Napoleon on St Helena

When Stalin approved of issuing fake invasion plans for Overlord, Churchill said, to Stalin's vast amusement, 'In wartime, Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Stalin did not trust Churchill, because he did not trust anyone (except, for two years, Adolf Hitler).

Los hombres que han cambiado el mundo nunca han triunfado por ganarse a los poderosos, sino por agitar a las masas. El primer método es fruto de las intrigas, y solo ofrece un resultado limitado. El segundo es el recorrido del genio, y cambia el rostro del mundo. Napoleón en Santa Helena

The masses … should be directed without their being aware of it.' Napoleon to Fouché, September 1804

that Power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That Power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy. What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany

You may, by the arbitrary and sterile act of Government,' he said, 'for, remember, Governments create nothing and have nothing to give but what they have first taken away Ã¢â'¬â€œ you may put money in the pocket of one set of Englishmen, but it will be money taken from the pockets of another set of Englishmen, and the greater part will be spilled on the way.'67 He

On Liberty, 'that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.

If you treat the mob with kindness,' he told Joseph later, 'these creatures fancy themselves invulnerable; if you hang a few, they get tired of the game, and become as submissive and humble as they ought to be.

Good and upstanding people must be persuaded by gentle means,' Napoleon would later write. 'The rabble must be moved by terror.

Napoleon taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment, an epic whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come.

More books have been written with Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821.

Nations slaughter each other for family quarrels, cutting each other's throats in the name of the Ruler of the Universe, knavish and greedy priests working on their imagination by means of their love of the marvellous and their fears.

When Churchill was twenty, the British Empire covered more than one-fifth of the earth's land surface

The temptation to tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy,' he later wrote in The World Crisis; 'the outlook of the leader on whose decisions fateful events depend is usually far more sanguine than the brutal facts admit.'45