Quotes About Power

They agree that the chosen have "absolute right" to smash the rest of mankind. They agree that might, being the expression of destiny, makes right.

The standard by which ideas are to be judged, Hitler says repeatedly, is not "abstract" considerations of logic or fidelity to fact. The standard is: usefulness to the Volk.

There is no such thing as truth," explains Hitler, "either in the moral or in the scientific sense." Or as Goebbels puts the point: "Important is not what is right but what wins.

I tell you," declared Goering, dismissing a criticism of Hitler's economic policies, "if the Fuhrer wishes it then two times two are five."24

Observe in this connection that the Nazis, correctly, regarded the power of propaganda as an indispensable tool.

The alleged political equality of men under such a government, declared Rosa Luxemburg, the top Spartacist theoretician, "is nothing but lies and falsehoods so long as the economic power of capital still exists.

In an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic backing of millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens. What is the factor that made this possible?

the "total state." The term, from which the adjective "totalitarian" derives, was coined by Hitler's mentor, Mussolini.

Nationalism, said Hitler—echoing German thinkers from Fichte through Spengler—means the power of the nation over the individual in every realm, including economics; i.e., it means socialism. Socialism, he said, means rule by the whole, by the greatest of all wholes, Germany.

The root cause of Nazism lies in a power that most people ignore, disparage—and underestimate. The cause is not the events hailed or cursed in headlines and street rallies, but the esoteric writings of the professors who, decades or centuries earlier, laid the foundation for those events.

Power belongs to the whole. The individual serves it. The whole is sovereign. . . . Everyone is given his place. There are commands and obedience.

For the most part, the leading spirits of the Progressive era were men who had been students here or abroad in the 1880s or '90s. They were the voices of the first American generation to be reared in college on the new collectivist theories; they were men trained to the conviction that an increase in the power of the state is the solution to most of mankind's problems.

How could a slight, five-foot-tall, two-legged animal create such sublimity and yet wreak so much havoc in so minuscule an interval of earth's history?

Some preachers need a travel agent to handle all the guilt trips they put on God's people. But there is a big difference between putting a guilt trip on Christians and unveiling Christ to them. When Christ is presented in power, the Spirit of God will undoubtedly convict those who are walking in contradiction to their new nature.

Water is the driving force in nature.

He who does not oppose evil......commands it to be done.

Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.

Experience does not err; only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, ridiculous, or truly pitiable, he is lord and God thereof.

I know that there are numberless people who would, to satisfy a whim, destroy God and all the universe.

But the rope is still more horrible when it forms the noose around the necks of weak and ignorant people.

There's nothing more political than epistemological struggles.

The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.

Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. Through man's passions, nature has given man into woman's hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.