Quotes About Power

Magic is a faculty of wonderful virtue, full of most high mysteries, containing the most profound contemplation of most secret things, together with the nature, power, quality, substance and virtues thereof, as also the knowledge of whole Nature, and it doth instruct us concerning the differing and agreement of things amongst themselves, whence it produceth its wonderful effects, by uniting the virtues of things through the application of them one to the other.

Das war ein Vorspiel nur; dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen." (Almansor)

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin.

We live in a world that is ringing with the clangour of weapons. Mankind is arming on all sides, and it will go ill with a state that is unable or unwilling to rely on its own strength.

Hitler's ability to keep a secret was unparalleled.

Yet how could I not have believed Hitler a genius and unique when every day I saw and heard how the major personalities of the Reich fawned over him and worshipped him with total devotion.

Before the war I often had the impression of being in the household of a busy architect and building tycoon rather than the Führer and Reich Chancellor.

Amid the chaos and confusion, one thing alone was certain: for the first time, a woman would sit upon the throne of England.

she at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex," the Gesta's author complained, "began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and more haughtily than she had been wont, to such a point that soon, in the capital of the land subject to her, she actually made herself queen of all England and gloried in being so called.

For the first time in the kingdom's history, all the contenders for the crown that Edward was about to relinquish were female.

It was to kings, not queens, that Tudor sovereigns looked for example and warning. ("I am Richard II, know ye not that?" Elizabeth sharply remarked in response to Shakespeare's meditation on the nature of kingship.)

What had been right in 1431 in English Rouen – to secure the girl's salvation by persuading her to abjure her heresy and embrace the loving counsel of the Church – was wrong twenty-five years later, in a kingdom from which God had driven the English with their tails between their legs.

I thought how money was like food. The smell, the way it came in portions, how badly you needed it. How hungry you got for it, that acidic longing which burned and sickened in your stomach. Firm muscular control was needed over food and money. Money could kill you, wanting and needing it and fighting its power.

There is an obvious difference between someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside.

You humans are the ones who want more. You want the whole world to bow to human desires.

No one makes a better enemy than a man who has had to beg for your help.

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life."

It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love, wealth, or power but the pursuit of attainable goals.

judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.

these boys chipping at the rigidities of social deference, in search of a place, a voice. In Spain too the old power seemed to be dying, but slowly and viciously and, as it turned out, not yet. Nor would it depart in the way scripted by Republican reformers, and not before in its passing it claimed from that generation a barbaric tribute, exacted in the coin of "national cleansing

similarities between Francoism and Stalinism.)

the machinery of direct repression.

The key to the Republic's enduring popular support lay not only in its most tangible reforms – in the areas of land, labour and welfare – crucial though these were for the redistribution of social and economic power. It also lay in a qualitative change, in the change of social atmosphere that it wrought

late Francoism: the extravagant bureaucracy easily circumvented by insiders;