Quotes about power

A pet. In pets, free will was tolerated only as long as the pet owner found it amusing.

The frog-pool wanted a king.

Jove sent them Old King Log.

I have been as deaf and blind and wooden as a log.

The frog-pool wanted a king.

Let Jove now send them Young King Stork.

Caligula's chief fault: his stork-reign was too brief.

My chief fault: I have been far too benevolent.

I repaired the ruin my predecessors spread.

I reconciled Rome and the world to monarchy again.

Rome is fated to bow to another Caesar.

Let him be mad, bloody, capricious, wasteful, lustful.

King Stork shall prove again the nature of kings.

By dulling the blade of tyranny I fell into great error.

By whetting the same blade I might redeem that error.

Violent disorders call for violent remedies.

Yet I am, I must remember, Old King Log.

I shall float inertly in the stagnant pool.

Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.

"You see what power is — holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them! Besides, maybe it is true. Maybe Peanut and Little Yu's mother are now big Communists, who knows?"

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers — not the defined.

“So you've never had any urge to rule the world, or anything like that?”

“What, me?” Vanderdecker said. “No, I can't say I have. It would be nice to change some things, naturally.”

Jane leaned forward and looked serious. “Such as?”

Vanderdecker considered. “I don't know,” he said, “now you come to mention it. I can't actually think of anything that even remotely matters. You get such a wonderful sense of perspective at my age.”

It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way a gun is power.

As in elections, the law pretended universal rights, while securing the interests of powerful houses.

It’s said that “power corrupts,” but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.

Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action or tactic is outside the experience of the people, it results in confusion, fear, and retreat. [...] The third rule is: Whenever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of "the common good" and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed. In this world irrationality clings to man like his shadow so that the right things get done for the wrong reasons—afterwards, we dredge up the right reasons for justification. It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where "reconciliation" means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation.

[T]he fifth rule: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.