Quotes About Power

To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

We have here the fundamental problem of ethics, the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice? -shall we seek righteousness, or shall we seek power? -is it better to be good, or to be strong?

There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.

violent revolutions do not so much redistribute wealth as destroy it. There may be a redivision of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as in the old. The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

but now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.

History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment.

Hence I think it is that democracies change into aristocracies, and these at length into monarchies,' people at last prefer tyranny to chaos. Equality of power is an unstable condition; men are by nature unequal; and 'he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.' Democracy has still to solve the problem of enlisting the best energies of men while giving to all alike the choice of those, among the trained and fit, by whom they wish to be ruled.

Nothing is impossible to gods and authors.

Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.

The division of members into Tories or Whigs had by 1761 lost nearly all significance; the real division was between supporters and opponents of the current "government," or ministry, or of the king. By and large the Tories protected the landed interest; the Whigs were willing now and then to consider the desires of the business class; otherwise both Tories and Whigs were equally conservative. Neither party legislated for the benefit of the masses.

Belief in God, said Diderot, is bound up with submission to autocracy; the two rise and fall together; and "men will never be free till the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

For he who can foresee with his mind is by nature intended to be lord and master; and he who can work only with his body is by nature a slave. The slave is to the master what the body is to the mind.

this alternation between centralized and decentralized power is one of the cyclical rhythms of history, as if men tired alternately of immoderate liberty and excessive order.

They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.

men and women have gambled in every age. In every age men have been dishonest and governments have been corrupt;

Man is woman's last domestic animal

Thanks be then to nature for this unsociableness, for this envious jealousy and vanity, for this insatiable desire for possession and for power.. Man wishes concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; and she wills discord, in order that man may be impelled to a new exertion of his powers, and to the further development of his natural capacities.

a pathological concentration of wealth, leading to class wars, disruptive revolutions, and financial exhaustion: these are some of the ways in which a civilization may die.

When those who must do the fighting have the right to decide between war and peace, history will no longer be written in blood.

The defect of democracy is its tendency to put mediocrity into power; and there is no way of avoiding this except by limiting office to men of "trained skill."138 Numbers by themselves cannot produce wisdom, and may give the best favors of office to the grossest flatterers.

Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, they (bankers) know that history is inflationary, and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and

When Germany defeated Napoleon it was a disastrous to culture as when Luther defeated the Church.

The politics of the Essays preach a conservatism natural in one who aspired to rule. Bacon wants a strong central power. Monarchy is the best form of government; and usually the efficiency of a state varies with the concentration of power.