Quotes About Power

The more important point, however, is not about what the money does. It's about what has to be done to get the money. The effect of the money might be (democratically) benign. But what is done to secure that money is not necessarily benign. To miss this point is to betray the Robin Hood fallacy: the fact that the loot was distributed justly doesn't excuse the means taken to secure it.

Lawyers rarely test their power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will it do good?" When challenged about the expanding reach of the law, the lawyer answers, "Why not?"

Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.

It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.

When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire -- nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?

When the Church tries to embody the rule of God in the forms of earthly power it may achieve that power, but it is no longer a sign of the kingdom.

A person who wields power cannot see truth; that is the privilege of the powerless.

The New Age movement, for all the validity of its protest and the value of some of its recommendations, is in truth a very old blind alley. There is a very long history to remind us of what happens when nature is our ultimate point of reference . . . . Nature knows no ethics. There is no right and wrong in nature; the controlling realities are power and fertility.

bureaucracy is the rule of nobody and is therefore experienced as tyranny.

Modern science has placed in human hands the power to do things that were previously unimaginable. Technology, the development of ever more sophisticated means for achieving any end we choose, dominates modern and modernized societies. But there is a growing perception that science and technology are no substitute for wisdom - for the power to discern what ends are in accordance with the truth and the power to judge rightly between alternative ends.

When coercion of any kind is used in the interests of the Christian message, the message itself is corrupted.

the authority of Jesus is ultimate, the

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

The fact is that we prepare for war like giants, and for peace like pygmies.

Stalin's dethronement meant not only the collapse of one authority, but that of a whole institution.

Communism has ceased in general to be an intellectual problem, remaining simply a matter of governmental power and repression.

Leninism raised political opportunism to the dignity of a theory.

In fact, you cannot condemn torture on political grounds, because in most cases it is perfectly efficient and the torturers get what they want. You can condemn it only on moral grounds and then, necessarily, everywhere in the same way, in Batista's Cuba or in Castro's Cuba, in North Vietnam and in South Vietnam.

Marxism under Stalin cannot be defined by any collection of statements, ideas, or concepts: it was not a question of propositions as such but of the fact that there existed an all-powerful authority competent to declare at any given moment what Marxism was and what it was not.

The disagreements between Stalin and Trotsky were real to a certain extent, but they were grossly inflated by the struggle for personal power and never amounted to two independent and coherent theories.

like all over-thrown Communist leaders he became a democrat as soon as he was ousted from power.

The idea of perfect equality, i.e. an equal share of all goods for everybody, is not only unfeasible economically but is contradictory in itself: for perfect equality can only be imagined under a system of extreme despotism, but despotism itself presupposes inequality at least in such basic advantages as participation in power and access to information.

'Tis a strange mystery, the power of words! Life is in them, and death. A word can send The crimson colour hurrying to the cheek. Hurrying with many meanings; or can turn The current cold and deadly to the heart. Anger and fear are in them; grief and joy Are on their sound; yet slight, impalpable:-- A word is but a breath of passing air.