Quotes About Power

But the real basis of Germany's recovery was rearmament

And the German people? On August 19, some 95 per cent of those who had registered went to the polls, and 90 per cent, more than thirty-eight million of them, voted approval of Hitler's usurpation of complete power. Only four and a quarter million Germans had the courage—or the desire—to vote "No.

Prussia," remarked Mirabeau, "is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.

They and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, had pushed political power into the hands of the reluctant Social Democrats. In doing so they managed also to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying on them the blame for Germany's defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people.

Goebbels was sure of one thing, though: "Once we have the power we will never give it up. They will have to carry our dead bodies out of the ministries.

Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as "imperialist" as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution.

But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hours before his turn would have come he swallowed a vial of poison that had been smuggled into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rival for the succession, Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hour in choosing the way in which he would depart this earth, on which he, like the other two, had made such a murderous impact.

He made it clear enough that there would be no "democratic nonsense" and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehrerprinzip, the leadership principle—that is, that it would be a dictatorship.

Without Lenin and Hitler the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions most probably would not have succeeded. Without Gandhi there would have been no serious threat to British rule as the 1930's began. In India I began to see that Gandhi, as Friedrich Meinecke would say of Hitler, was already one of the examples of the singular and incalculable power of personality in historical life. In India it was the only such personality there was.

The British, he (Gandhi) said, want us to put the struggle on the plane of machine-guns where they have the weapons and we do not. Our only assurance of beating them is putting the struggle on a plane where we have the weapons and they do not.

The secret police announced that two men were shot for "resisting arrest" yesterday. One of them, it is stated, was trying to induce some German workers to lay down their tools in an important armament factory. Himmler now has power to shoot anyone he likes without trial.

The white man will never be alone. Let him be just, and deal kindly with my people. For the dead are not powerless.

At night when the streets of your towns and cities are quiet, and you think them empty, they will throng with the spirits that once thronged them, and still love those places. The white man will never be alone. So let him be just and deal kindly with my people. The dead have power too.

My Google-fu is strong.

I do not dream , der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars.

When the rich grow afraid, they get nasty.

Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.

Imagine if one of them were turned. Imagine if one could be bought.' 'But they're chosen just so's they can't be bought...' 'History...' Jacobs spoke with terse authority. Brought Ori to a hush. 'Is all full. And dripping. With the corpses . Of them who trusted the incorruptible .

Language is the continuation of coercion by other means.

We could take his gag away , thought Isaac, and he wouldn't scream . . . but then he might speak . . . He left the gag in place.

This is a Possible Letter. Until the last second, when I write your name beside that word "Dear," all those sheets and months ago, this is a Possible Letter, pregnant with potentiality. I am very powerful right now. I am all ready to mine the possibilities, make one of them fact.

In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.

I can dig my claws into the rim of a building's crown and spread my arms and feel the buffets and gouts of boisterous air and I can close my eyes and remember, for a moment, what it is to fly.

But sometimes it ain't the strongest wins. And especially when the stronger thinks, because it's stronger, that it ain't got to try to fight.