Quotes About Power

People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

Do not allow yourselves to be cajoled into supposing that political apathy is dangerous. Dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin are raised to power, not by apathy, but by mass fanaticism.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Wednesday, Hendricks telephoned acceptance, and on Friday afternoon Roosevelt joyfully released news of the nomination to the press. Privately, to his old Assembly colleague Henry L. Sprague, he wrote: "I have always been fond of the West African proverb: 'Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.' Ã¢â'¬Â28

He castigates his habitual targets, "the dull, the feeble, and the timid good," and proclaims himself a strong man, careless of class, color, or party politics. "If I find a public servant who is dishonest, I will chop his head off if he is the highest Republican in this municipality!

If he was less motivated by compassion than anger at what he saw as the arrogance of capital,he chafed,nonetheless,to regulate it.

Diplomacy, Roosevelt insisted, is utterly useless when there is no force behind it; the diplomat is the servant, not the master of the soldier.

What worried Roosevelt was the inability of ordinary people to see the danger of this proliferation of cogs and cylinders and coins in American life.23 The corrupt power of corporations was increasing at an alarming rate

Persuasion should come before force. In any case it is the availability of raw power, not the use of it, that makes for effective diplomacy.

As he waved at grizzled old Southerners, and they in turn waved the Stars and Stripes back at him, Roosevelt reflected that only thirty-three years before these men had been enemies of the Union.44 It took war to heal the scars of war; attack upon a foreign power to bring unity at home. But what future war would heal the scars of this one?

confidently, "President

Unless wealth was chastened by culture or regulated by government, it was at worst predatory, at best boring.

a stocky figure in a frock coat sprang up the front steps of the White House.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere.

the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth.

entirely unprincipled, with the same idea of Public Life and Civil Service that a vulture has of a dead sheep.

O Who can tell The hidden power of herbes, and might of Magick spell?

This isn't a banana republic. You can't pull strings in America, pay off an official, lean on your cousin. It's not like France or Spain – those banana republics.

The best explanation of masochism, the appeal of masochism, is that it accepts shame; the sickening shame one must swallow and hide is at last accepted, employed, even loved—the shame about a mutilation, hairiness, too much or not enough fat, the shame about wanting to serve, to be a dog, son, wife, slave, horse, prisoner.

Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in the balance of power, but something that was more discussed than performed, a simple emission of fluid that somehow generated religious, social and economic consequences.

Charles used to say, "If God had meant boys to be fucked, he would have put a hole in their ass.

Yet New York is always the chef, never the diner. Being

I was three people: the boy who smelled bad when I was with my sister; the boy who was wise and kind beyond his years when I was with my mother; but when I was alone not a boy at all but a principle of power, of absolute power.

What if I can't get it up?" Guy wailed. "That's of no importance if you're on the right end of a whip.

I wanted power so badly that I had convinced myself I already had too much of it, that I was an evil schemer who might destroy everyone around me through the poison seeping out of my pores. I was appalled by my own majesty. I wanted someone to betray.