Quotes About Power

Nepotism is the lowest and least imaginative form of corruption.

What does a car bomb say about poverty, or the execution of a rural mayor explain about disenfranchisement?... The war had become, it it wasn't from the beginning, an indecipherable text.

Are you a politician? I hate politicians, he said. And, in any case, there's no such thing anymore: only sycophants and dissidents.

none carries more power than the moment when a leader signals vulnerability. As Dave Cooper says, I screwed that up are the most important words any leader can say.

Increasing people's sense of power—that is, tweaking a situation to make them feel more invulnerable—dramatically diminished their willingness to cooperate.

All men would be tyrants if they could.

It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.

Nature has left this tincture in the blood, That all men would be tyrants if they could.

The whole point of having heroes is you can look up to people who can get away with whatever they want. Because like you said, they've always had the courage to do whatever they want. Right?

They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?

I was struck, in fact, by President Johnson's reaction to these revelations as "close to treason," because it reflected to me this sense that what was damaging to the reputation of a particular administration, a particular individual, was in effect treason, which is very close to saying "I am the state." And I think that quite sincerely many Presidents, not only Lyndon Johnson, have come to feel that.

deliberate bombing of urban populations as the principal way of fighting a war by a major industrial power can be said to have started on February 14, 1942, with a specific British directive

I was exactly like the various White House officials who testified later during the Watergate hearings that they had believed—in the words of their boss, President Nixon—that "when the president does it, it is not illegal.

Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.

Within the arsenal there were some five hundred bombs with an explosive power of twenty-five megatons. Each of these warheads had more firepower than all the bombs and shells exploded in all the wars of human history.

in the summer of 1964, coincided with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which became the basis for a congressional resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson almost unlimited authority to pursue the Vietnam War. Ellsberg establishes that the incident was not the military attack on an American ship that Congress thought it was, and that the administration was cooking up evidence to justify a course of action it had already decided upon.

without President Kennedy's knowledge, and, brandishing the might of the United States

This is precisely the explanation given to the president in Dr. Strangelove for his lack of ability to send a Stop order to the planes that have been launched by the mad base commander General Jack D. Ripper.

The major in charge of this little collection of Quonset huts and planes in the hills controlled six and a half times World War II's worth of firepower.

In terms of cost and effectiveness, the air force tenets were simply wrong. In any case, only Britain and America had really prepared themselves in the way of designing heavy bombers for long-range heavy bombardment. And this was not a response to Hitler's aggressions; it started well before Hitler came to power.

Yet what seems to me beyond question is that any social system (not only ours) that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put a trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being—anyone, not just this man, still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons—is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.

At the end of his two terms, President Eisenhower bequeathed to the Kennedy administration eighteen thousand nuclear weapons.

Do you ever feel like the Redcoats?

thoughts (ANTs) and talk back to them, you begin to take away their power and gain control over your moods. Kill the ANTs by feeding your emotional anteater. The "kill the ANTs/feed your anteater" exercise is for whenever you feel anxious, nervous, depressed, or frazzled. Here are some examples of ways to kill these ANTs: