“The power to kill becomes the ultimate power in the hands of a man who has no reservations about employing it.”

"Flynn's Sin Was Lying To Liars, Not Colluding With Russia," http://www.wnd.com/2017/12/flynns-sin-was-lying-to-liars-not-colluding-with-russia/ WND.COM, December 7, 2017
2010s, 2017

Source: Social Problems (1883), Ch. 21 : Conclusion
Context: Many there are, too depressed, too embruted with hard toil and the struggle for animal existence, to think for themselves. Therefore the obligation devolves with all the more force on those who can. If thinking men are few, they are for that reason all the more powerful. Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power. That for every idle word men may speak they shall give an account at the day of judgment, seems a hard saying. But what more clear than that the theory of the persistence of force, which teaches us that every movement continues to act and react, must apply as well to the universe of mind as to that of matter? Whoever becomes imbued with a noble idea kindles a flame from which other torches are lit, and influences those with whom he comes in contact, be they few or many. How far that influence, thus perpetuated, may extend, it is not given to him here to see. But it may be that the Lord of the Vineyard will know.

Source: Two Boys Kissing

Quoted in "After Stanley Kubrick" (18 August 2010), an interview of his wife Christiane Kubrick in The Guardian

Arguing that Confucianism ought to be considered a religion and not a 'moralistic rationalism.'
The World's Religions (1991)

Source: 1980s, Three Faces of Power, 1989, p. 109

Real Time with Bill Maher (15 October 2004)

Source: Images of Organization (1986), p. 158