“The game of power is played remorselessly by men who have not the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, the way ordinary people live, and the ordinary people are too terrified to protest.”
A Vision of the Uncorrupted Society, p. 279 (See also: Niccolò Machiavelli..)
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)
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Pierre Stephen Robert Payne 28
British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer 1911–1983Related quotes
“Twitter is the people’s tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources.”
Ventura, Catherine. “ Is Twitter a Human Right? One Chinese Activist Thinks So http://www.huffingtonpost.com/catherine-ventura/is-twitter-a-human-right_b_501971.html.” Huffington Post, March 17, 2012.
2010-, 2012
The World's Religions (1991)
Context: The people who first heard Jesus' disciples proclaiming the Good News were as impressed by what they saw as by what they heard. They saw lives that had been transformed--men and women who were ordinary in every way except for the fact that they seemed to have found the secret of living. They evinced a tranquility, simplicity, and cheerfulness that their hearers had nowhere else encountered. Here were people who seemed to be making a success of the enterprise everyone would like to succeed at--that of life itself.
"Benedict Cumberbatch interview" in TimeOut https://www.timeout.com/kuala-lumpur/film/benedict-cumberbatch-interview (21 November 2016)
“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.”
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
“Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.”
"From a German War Primer"
Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 3, The Sensibility of the Sixties, p. 131
Speech to Conservative Central Council (15 March 1986) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106348
Second term as Prime Minister
Context: Conservatism is not some abstract theory. It's a crusade to put power in the hands of ordinary people. And a very popular crusade it is proving. Tenants are jumping at the opportunity to buy their own council houses. Workers are jumping at the opportunity to buy shares in their own privatised companies. Trade unionists are jumping at the opportunity, which the ballot box now gives them, to decide “who rules” in their union. And the rest of Britain is looking on with approval. For popular capitalism is biting deep.