Quotes About Power

We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation. IX

Cyrus and Darius created Persia, Xerxes inherited it, his successors destroyed it.

We recall Macaulay's warning that democracy would collapse when the poor used their electoral power to rob rich Peter to pay lazy Paul. Polybius expressed the same idea in 130 BC: When

He who steals from a citizen," said Cato, "ends his days in fetters and chains; but he who steals from the community ends them in purple and gold."17

Is it not shameful that men should be ruled by orators, who "go ringing on in long harangues, like brazen pots which, when struck, continue to sound till a hand is put upon them"?

The state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history.

Scripture does not explain things by their secondary causes, but only narrates them in the order and style which has most power to move men... It's object is not to convince the reason, but to attract and last hold of the imagination. (Chapter on Spinoza, p.162/543)

War is a nation's way of eating.

At the other end of the scale history reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.

It was a modest invention, but its uses were so varied that man always looked upon it as a symbol of power and authority, from the wand of the fairies and the staff of the shepherd to the rod of Moses or Aaron, the ivory cane of the Roman consul, the lituus of the augurs, and the mace of the magistrate or the king.

When Cyrus and his disciplined Persians stood at the gates, the anticlericals of Babylon connived to open the city to him, and welcomed his enlightened domination.170 For two centuries Persia ruled Babylonia as part of the greatest empire that history had yet known. Then the exuberant Alexander came, captured the unresisting capital, conquered all the Near East, and drank himself to death in the palace of Nebuchadrezzar.171

Science gives man ever greater powers but less significance. It gives him better tools with less purposes. It is silent on origins, values, and ultimate aims. It gives life and history no meaning or worth that is not canceled by time and death.

Many simple peoples feared the exceptional individual as a disintegrating force; there is a Chinese proverb that "the great man is a public misfortune.

Government and History

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being; and the endeavor wherewith a thing seeks to persist in its own being is nothing else than the actual essence of that thing";65 the power whereby a thing persists is the core and essence of its being.

citizens could forget, while they went through all the forms of the dead Republic, that they were living under a military monarchy in which force was hidden so long as phrases could rule.

justice is the interest of the stronger

Political society has made the many the property of the few.

When sakura fall from the branch, the shock waves can shatter entire cities.

Prayer? I asked. Of course. If you're not connected to the source of all knowledge, you're no better than a telephone when one of these lines is down. He gestured with his stick at the wires above our heads.

If I lived in North Korea, I'd want my own army, too.

Powers is the greatest aphrodisiac. -Nicole Muldoon

politician twenty-two years her senior, had been calculated, strategized, and arranged. It was