Quotes About Power

The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentleman … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.

When you are about to hand control of the senate and people of Rome, the armies, the provinces, the allies to one man alone, would you look to the belly of a wife to produce him or search for an heir to supreme power only within the walls of your own home? … If he is to rule over all, he must be chosen from all.' Tacitus

To put it another way, the individual rich voter had far greater voting power than his poorer fellow citizens.

a reminder that the body beautiful was not so very far from the body brutalised.

who wryly observed that no one would believe there was a plot against an emperor until he was found dead?

Quo usque tandem ignorabitis vires vestras?' ('How long will you go on being ignorant of your strength?')

In 63 BCE the city of Rome was a vast metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, larger than any other in Europe before the nineteenth century; and, although as yet it had no emperors, it ruled over an empire stretching from Spain to Syria, from the South of France to the Sahara. It was a sprawling mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and

Cicerón hizo ejecutar a los hombres sumariamente, sin ni siquiera un juicio de farsa. Con triunfalismo, anunció sus muertes a la entusiasmada multitud con un famoso eufemismo de una sola palabra: vixere, «han vivido»; es decir, «están muertos».

cultural anxieties are often a privilege of the rich.

Do those words matter? Of course they do, because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humour from what women have to say.

All too often, even the most glamorous rebels are just as unappealing, under the surface, as the imperialist tyrants themselves.

no proposals or even amendments could come from the floor; in the case of almost every piece of proposed legislation we know of, the people voted in favour of what was put before them. This was not popular power as we understand

Who could be so indifferent or so idle that they did not want to find out how, and under what kind of political organisation, almost the whole of the inhabited world was conquered and fell under the sole power of the Romans in less than fifty-three years, something previously unparalleled?' Who indeed?

He spotted, for example, the importance of religion, or 'fear of the gods', in controlling Roman behaviour

He sums this up in a pithy sentence: 'They called it, in their ignorance, "civilisation", but it was really part of their enslavement' ('Humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset').

they create desolation and call it peace'

Para conseguir su imperio, los romanos no aplastaron brutalmente a pueblos inocentes que se ocupaban de sus propios asuntos en pacífica armonía hasta que las legiones aparecieron en el horizonte

Unchecked competition eventually did more to destroy than to uphold the Republic.

The secret, Polybius suggested, lay in a delicate relationship of checks and balances between consuls, the senate and the people, so that neither monarchy nor aristocracy nor democracy ever entirely prevailed.

As young Scipio Nasica found to his cost, the success of the rich was a gift bestowed by the poor. The rich had to learn the lesson that they depended on the people as a whole. An

Roman military expansion drove Roman sophistication.

he saw to it that the greatest number did not have the greatest power – a principle that we should always stand by in politics.

Los emperadores romanos y sus consejeros nunca resolvieron el problema de la sucesión. Fueron derrotados en parte por la biología, en parte por las persistentes incertidumbres y desacuerdos sobre la mejor manera de transmitir la herencia. La

Fear of the enemy, so this argument went, had been good for Rome; without any significant external threat, 'the path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption