Recently added

I didn't feel the need to have a lot of yes-men standing around me. As Mitchell Sharp once put it, the bigger the staff, the smaller the minister.

There is nothing more nervous than a million dollars - it moves very fast, and it doesn't speak any language.

Over the years, I have seen too many politicians ruin their careers because they could not accept defeat graciously.

Vision is not political rhetoric.

To be frank, politics is about wanting power, getting it, exercising it, and keeping it.

We feared [Ryland's Hounds] and hated them, perhaps more than we feared and hated the Quality who held us, for all of us were low, we were all Tasked, and we should be in union and arrayed against the Quality, if only the low whites would wager their crumbs for a slice of the whole cake. (p. 57)

[A white person] was among the most fanatical agents I ever encountered on the Underground. All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.

'The creature no human could overcome? It was a lesson, Bane. A good man tried to teach it to me many years ago. You cannot overcome hatred with more hatred. Sometimes you have to surrender in order to win. There are only three possibilities when faced with an enemy: run from him, fight him, or make him your friend. The creature in the circle was created to respond. Attack it - and it will come back at you with twice your strength. I ignored it. And it, true to its nature, ignored me.'

Everybody has the right to speak up in a democracy. We would be in trouble as a society if there wasn't a constant pressure to make reforms and to be just. Sometimes as prime minister, when I was caught up in a really loud demonstration, I used to say to myself that I deserved it because of all the demonstrations I myself had organized as a student against Duplessis.

"Well lad, this is what you have chosen. Are you pleased with yourself?"

“I am alive," said Bane.

“And eight men are dead," said Landis. “Eight souls cast out of the world. More mothers to grieve, more children to know sorrow. Is this a life you want for yourself?”

“No it is not," Bane told him. “But we do what we must.”

“Not true! We do what we choose. And we face the consequences."

Politicians of all stripes are always in danger at looking at every problem from an abstract point of view or being briefed by officials, academics, or economists who know every science but the science of human nature.

Put people in a cage and they will devote themselves to escaping it, not cooperating with those who caged them.