Quotes About Power

The old marchioness had him tracing down bed hangings and carpets for her. Send that. Be here. To her, all the world was a menial. If she wanted a lobster or a sturgeon, she ordered it up, and if she wanted good taste she ordered it in the same way. The marchioness would run her hand over Florentine silks, making little squeaks of pleasure. "You bought it, Master Cromwell," she would say. "And very beautiful it is. Your next task is to work out how we pay for it.

Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor's office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law.

To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king's whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn't, and I am dead.

It's all right for you, you and Danton. I have to go and stutter for two hours at the Jacobins and probably be knocked down again by maddened violin makers and trampled by all sorts of tradesmen. Whilst Danton spends his evenings feeling up his new girlfriend and you lie around here in a nice fever, not too high. If you're an instrument of destiny, and anyone would do instead, why don't you take a holiday?

I wonder," he says, "how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king's pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded." At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled.

But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

It's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on.

But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they're mine.

A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

He would have thought God could make his own decisions, but Weston believes the creator may be pushed and coaxed and maybe bribed a little.

But what do they get by the change? One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honor, and in comes a hungry and a lean man.

As for the future, the king's desires move swiftly and the law must run to keep up.

What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold.

And the more the king snips and carps, the more do his petitioners seek out the company of Cromwell, so unfailing in his amiable courtesy. At home, Jo comes to him looking perplexed. She

To gentle pressure, King Henry capitulated; the White Rose, aged twenty-four, was taken out into God's light and air, in order to have his head cut off. But there is always another White Rose; the Plantagenets breed, though not unsupervised. There will always

My mother did not need much food - she ran on wrath (pp94)

it's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir, to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in the street and stamped on.

And Louis is weak. Let him give an inch, and some Cromwell will appear.

But just as everything was going along politely, quietly and wonderfully — in poured Citizen Danton and his crew.

The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.

Men like Carew, he knows, tend to blame him, Cromwell, for Anne's rise in the world; he facilitated it, he broke the old marriage and let in the new. He does not expect them to soften to him, to include him in their companionship; he only wants them not to spit in his dinner.

When Stephen comes into a room, the furnishings shrink from him. Chairs scuttle backwards. Joint-stools flatten themselves like pissing bitches. The woollen Bible figures in the king's tapestries lift their hands to cover their ears.

They say she has all the gentlemen of the king's privy chamber, one after another. She don't like delay so they all stand in a line frigging their members, till she shouts, "Next.

This is what Henry does. He uses people up. He takes all they give him and more. When he is finished with them he is noisier and fatter and they are husks or corpses.