Quotes About Power

A pure breed of steed is steered sheerly by the shadow of the lash, but even the spur cannot stir a mount of trash.

Alexander was no longer so much the master of his lust, having been fawned upon by Fortune, whom mortal men too little distrust.

Alexander's mere name and the fame of his feats raised rulers and realms across virtually the whole world. And those who kept control of even the slightest slice of his huge heritage were reckoned most renowned.

An empire that could have stood sound under a single sovereign was wrecked through being run by sundry rulers.

Too often government responds to the whispers of lobbyists before the cries of the people.

I am the government.

People go into politics because they want the affirmation, and they want the applause.

All history is just one man trying to take something away from another man, and usually it doesn't really belong to either of them.

Love is as strong as death, as hard as hell.

Who would have guessed that the monster of fraud was a democracy?)

I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.

Exterior: the jungle. Interior: Dark night of the white man's soul.

Get rich. Live life to the fullest. Destroy the world.

An alternative modernity worthy of the name would recover the mediating power of ethics and aesthetics. This would be accomplished not by a return to blind traditionalism but through the democratization of technically mediated institutions. Power

The Second World War signalled the creation of the military-industrial complex in Britain and elsewhere. This militarized economy, born out of an imperial system and expanding to vast proportions during the war, largely remained in place into the Cold War.

The vote reflected both the power of the Israel lobby and scepticism over Saudi support for the US following an American air strike on Libya, with some US politicians fearing Saudi Arabia might divert weapons to 'terrorists'.16

The arms trade – an intricate web of networks between the formal and shadow worlds, between government, commerce and criminality – often makes us poorer, not richer, less not more safe, and governed not in our own interests but for the benefit of a small, self-serving elite, seemingly above the law, protected by the secrecy of national security and accountable to no one.

Disparate groups emerged within countries or without any national affiliation in the case of religious extremism, seeking power or to cause maximum disruption for a diversity of reasons – the promise of ethnic utopia, economic advantage or religious expression. For the smaller arms dealers operating in the shadows, these new clients were fertile ground.

If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

Conquest is shown to be an arbitrary act devoid of distinction and significance.

I ended up as much a Maoist failure as I had been a Christian failure. Souls were still unsaved, and the imperialist bourgeoisie was still in power. Before I graduated from high school, I had lost my faith in the fundamentalist God I had been trained to worship and serve.

war is inherently poisonous, giving rise to all sorts of problematic consequences, and that military power is something that democracies ought to treat gingerly.

In short, Vietnam had demonstrated that when it came to deciding when to go to war and how to fight, civilians were not to be trusted.

if, as seems probable, the effort [the U.S. invasion of Iraq] encounters greater resistance than its architects imagine, our way of life may find itself tested in ways that will make the Vietnam War look like a mere blip in American history. (March 2003)