Quotes About Power

We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter but with guns.

Once we have power, we shall never again give it up, unless we are carried out as corpses from our offices.

There are men in frock coats and top hats with the blood of the world on their hands, and they eat with silver forks and white napkins every day, and they will give up their last breath in a linen-made bed whilst the ones they sent out to die lie forgotten in the earth, mouldering bones with the poppies fat and red above 'em. Ah, mankind.

The people who influence our presidents matter.

The essence of what they said was that man made God, not God made man, and that the duty of every Communist is to rid himself of the supernatural bondage of religion; that religion is used by the powers that be in order to keep the masses of the people in docile submission to exploitation. Therefore, the liberation of the masses of humanity is dependent upon their emancipation from religious ideology.

It was December 30, 1933, and the author of the Great Purge wined and dined Bullitt. At the end of a lovely evening together, FDR's new ambassador bade Stalin goodnight with a tender kiss on the cheek; the doting despot dutifully reciprocated.24

my strength is made perfect in weakness

The artist does not ascribe to the natural form of appearance the same convincing significance as the realists who are his critics. He does not feel so intimately bound to that reality, because he cannot see in the formal products of nature the essence of the creative process. He is more concerned with formative powers than with formal products.

Assyria soon discovered a painful truth: empires are like Ponzi schemes: financial frauds in which previous investors are paid returns out of new investors' deposits. The costs of holding imperial territory can only be underwritten by loot and tribute extracted by constant new conquests; empires must continue to expand if they are not to collapse.

But belief in a system cannot be sustained for ever. Empires based solely on power and domination, while allowing their subjects to do as they will, can last for centuries. Those that try to control the everyday lives of their people are much harder to sustain.

Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.

The rich are different from you and me: they have more influence.

Wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the power of doctrines — how support for a false dogma can become politically mandatory, and how overwhelming contrary evidence only makes such dogmas stronger and more extreme.

In proportion as the mass of citizens who possess political rights increases, and the number of elected ruler's increases, the actual power is concentrated and becomes the monopoly of a smaller and smaller group of individuals.

Tisto, ?emur nekateri pravijo korupcija, je v resnici visoka Fideszova politika. Ho?em povedati, da si je vlada zadala, da bo ustvarila skupino doma?ih podjetnikov, ki bodo postali stebri mo?ne Madžarske.

Actually, my children. I AM GOD, and I will rule all space and time.

When I was a kid, Granny filled a bushel basket with her do's and don'ts. She taught me never to start a fight but to know how to end one. To be wary of the rich and powerful. And to go through life doing the least damage possible. Thanks to her, I favor the underdog. I root against the Yankees, the Lakers, and the Patriots. If Germany invaded Poland—again—I'd take the points and go with the Poles.

A shark that can't bite is nothing but a mermaid.

Thrasymachus said it was just a word invented by the victors to rule the losers. Like, we won the war; now we make the laws.

The federal government is a ponderous battleship, weighed down by its own armor and slow to change course. But when it chooses to marshal its might against an individual, the government is a lean, mean, conviction machine. Meanwhile, the defendant's lawyer is a loinclothed Roman gladiator protected by a wooden shield, leather shin guards, and prayers to the god Jupiter. The Constitution promises due process but not a fair fight.

Federal judges are kings and queens. They are appointed for life. No messy elections, no grubbing for lawyers' campaign contributions. They sit on thrones above the lowly members of their kingdom and are served by a royal retinue of law clerks, judicial assistants, court clerks, jury clerks, courtroom deputies, administrators, and, for all I know, court jesters.

You don't buy a Supreme Court judge," Max said. "Nobody ever has.

The psyche is the essence of humanity, its greatest instrument, an indefinable, multidimensional creative entity of enormous scope, subtlety, and power that eludes all attempts to explain it, including this one. The psyche becomes impossible to fully describe because there is nothing, including the process of describing it, that is not 'it' in action.