Quotes About Power

In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it.

explanation for such a one-sided transaction: "This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have just given England a maritime rival that sooner or later will lay low her pride.

At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, '...what would we gain by helping the french destroy Germany?' he replied: 'what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be'.

For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings.

The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century's decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.

Who controls the money controls the world

Its requirement of frequent daily prayers made faith a way of life; its emphasis on the identity of religious and political power transformed the expansion of Islam from an imperial enterprise into a sacred obligation.

World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable to the entire world.

If the major powers come to practice foreign policies of manipulating a multiplicity of subsovereign units observing ambiguous and often violent rules of conduct, many based on extreme articulations of divergent cultural experiences, anarchy is certain.

The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other's domestic affairs and checking each other's ambitions through a general equilibrium of power.

The essence of building a constructive world order is that no single country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in the immediate post–Cold War period, when it was materially and psychologically preeminent.

Well, you can just stop and think of what could happen if anybody with a decent system of government got control of that mainland. Good God.… There'd be no power in the world that could even—I mean, you put 800 million Chinese to work under a decent system… and they will be the leaders of the world.34

If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint.

Yet after withdrawing from three wars in two generations—each begun with idealistic aspirations and widespread public support but ending in national trauma—America struggles to define the relationship between its power (still vast) and its principles.

In the military context, shi connotes the strategic trend and "potential energy" of a developing situation, "the power inherent in the particular arrangement of elements and… its developmental tendency."38 In The Art of War, the word connotes the ever-changing configuration of forces as well as their general trend.

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

Asia's International Order and China Of all conceptions of world order in Asia, China operated the longest lasting, the most clearly defined, and the one furthest from Westphalian ideas. China has also taken the most complex journey, from ancient civilization through classical empire, to Communist revolution, to modern great-power status—a course which will have a profound impact on mankind.

Whenever peace--conceived as the avoidance of war--has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community.

The logic of war is power, and power has no inherent limit. The logic of peace is proportion, and proportion implies limitation.

Não fizeram qualquer esforço para incluir a vizinha Rússia, que na época, findo o pesadelo de um «tempo de dificuldades», reconstruía a sua própria ordem consagrando princípios em clara contradição com o equilíbrio vestefaliano: um único soberano absoluto, uma ortodoxia religiosa unificada, e um programa de expansão territorial em todas as direções.

Era um sistema velho de milénios – vigorava já quando o Império Romano governou toda a Europa como unidade – e baseado não na igualdade soberana dos Estados, mas na presumível ausência de limite à soberania do imperador.

É que a visão americana assentava não na adoção do sistema europeu de equilíbrio de poder, mas na expansão dos princípios democráticos, de que resultaria o triunfo da paz.

um conjunto de regras de aceitação geral que define os limites de ação aceitáveis, e um equilíbrio de poder que impõe a contenção quando as regras são violadas, impedindo que determinada unidade política venha a subjugar as outras.

The ability to enable people to gather in a square differs from building new institutions of state.