Quotes about power

Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned. If no individual or institution possesses the authority to act without of everybody else in the room, then nobody is at fault if anything goes wrong.

"Honor," he said firmly. "I have great honor. So will you. But you will find that is not the same as power."

Every ruler wants to maintain the status quo.

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views.''' His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest.

Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.

He who enlists a man's mind wields a power even greater than the sword or the scepter.

They [the government] really want to maintain power. At the same time, they refuse to communicate. They refuse to have good intentions. They refuse to be sincere. How can that last?

They detained me for 81 days, but they never killed me. They clearly told me: 'If we were in the Cultural Revolution, you would have been killed 100 times.' They said: 'We have already improved.' I said: 'I thank you very much. Yes, you have improved. Not because you are really willing to improve yourself, but only because improvement is a matter of surviving.'

As an artist, I am very familiar with how to show the details, how to transform them into a language people can understand. They [the government] know that the Internet is a strong force, unbearable for them.

...there is a limited elite that understands the secrets of their own techniques, but not necessarily of all techniques. These men are close to the seat of modern governmental power. The state is no longer founded on the 'average citizen', but on the ability and knowledge of this elite. The average man is altogether unable to penetrate technical secrets or governmental organization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state.

It is not true that the perfection of police power is the result of the state’s Machiavellianism or of some transitory influence. The whole structure of society of society implies it, of necessity. The more we mobilize the forces of nature, the more must we mobilize men and the more do we require order.

The serf is essentially different from the knight, but a reference to divine right is needed to justify this difference in status.