Quotes About Power

A body of merchants had been transformed into the de facto sovereign rulers of much of northern India. As one contemporary observer put it: 'Through many unexpected contingencies, an incorporated society of private traders [has become] a cabinet of Asiatic princes.'65 The result was what Adam Smith would call 'a strange absurdity' – a Company State.66

Forget the politics of your agony. Politicians are vermin in the soul. They sway with the winds and keep you angry, and anger becomes madness, and madness is the step before death.

Power is the best shield that the disordered personality can conceive against being revealed as the laughing stock he secretly suspects himself to be.

Avarice is patriotic!

The corporation has evolved to serve the interests of whoever controls it, at the expense of whoever does not.

Between roars the lion purrs.

The world is governed by opinion.

Or ever the knightly years were goneWith the old world to the grave,I was a King in BabylonAnd you were a Christian Slave.

Out of the range of practical politics.

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.

I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

D]emocracy can itself be as tyrannical as a dictatorship, since it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom." -William F Buckley

It is safe to say that if the Communists took over the Sahara Desert tomorrow, two things would happen. First, nothing. And second, with their centralized approach to the market, there would be a shortage of sand.

Democracy can itself be as tyrannical as a dictatorship, since it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

By thirteen, I'd mostly stopped believing in God, but that was a new development and it left a hole in my world, a feeling that I'd been abandoned. The ocean was like an uncaring god, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.

We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every 10 minutes.

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

Alas, the penis is such a ridiculous petitioner. It is so unreliable, though everything depends on it—the world is balanced on it like a ball on a seal's nose. It is so easily teased, insulted, betrayed, abandoned; yet it must pretend to be invulnerable, a weapon which confers magical powers upon its possessor; consequently this muscleless inchworm must try to swagger through temples and pull apart thighs like the hairiest Samson, the mightiest ram.

Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil---the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.