“Unlike so many politicians or military leaders they made no attempt to justify their mistakes, to cling to power. For them power held enormous responsibility and was merely invested in them temporarily.”

Book 2, Chapter 5 “A Question of Attitudes” (p. 370)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Unlike so many politicians or military leaders they made no attempt to justify their mistakes, to cling to power. For t…" by Michael Moorcock?
Michael Moorcock photo
Michael Moorcock 224
English writer, editor, critic 1939

Related quotes

Charan Singh photo

“He studied law, but unlike many Indian leaders who rose to political power as practicing lawyers, he became known not as a lawyer but as a politician.”

Charan Singh (1902–1987) prime minister of India

Source: Trysts with Democracy: Political Practice in South Asia, p. 80

John F. Kennedy photo

“I think the United States should be a leader. A country as rich and powerful as this which bears so many burdens and responsibilities, which has so many opportunities, should be second to none.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, President John F. Kennedy's last formal speech and public words
Context: I think the United States should be a leader. A country as rich and powerful as this which bears so many burdens and responsibilities, which has so many opportunities, should be second to none. And in December, while I do not regard our mastery of space as anywhere near complete, while I recognize that there are still areas where we are behind — at least in one area, the size of the booster — this year I hope the United States will be ahead. And I am for it. We have a long way to go. Many weeks and months and years of long, tedious work lie ahead. There will be setbacks and frustrations and disappointments. There will be, as there always are, pressures in this country to do less in this area as in so many others, and temptations to do something else that is perhaps easier. But this research here must go on. This space effort must go on. The conquest of space must and will go ahead. That much we know. That much we can say with confidence and conviction.

Hatake Kakashi photo

“This place makes me think about the mistakes I've made in the past… and I've made so many of them.”

To Yugao, about Obito's name engraved in the Memorial Stone

Vanna Bonta photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. photo

“Life is action, the use of one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it is the one end that justifies itself.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 85.
1910s

Mobutu Sésé Seko photo

“Science has brought us power and ideas but not the wisdom or responsibility to handle them.”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: Liber Null & Psychonaut (1987), p. 113

Jacques Derrida photo

“If,­ there is a tendency in all Western democracies no longer to respect the professional politician or even the party member as such, it is no longer only because of some personal insufficiency, some fault, or some incompetence, or because of some scandal that can now be more widely known, amplified, and in fact often produced, if not premeditated by the power of the media. Rather, it is because politicians become more and more, or even solely characters in the media's representation at the very moment when the transformation of the public space, precisely by the media, causes them to lose the essential part of the power and even of the competence they were granted before by the structures of parliamentary representation, by the party apparatuses that were linked to it, and so forth. However competent they may personally be, professional politicians who conform to the old model tend today to become structurally incompetent. The same media power accuses, produces, and amplifies at the same time this incompetence of traditional politicians: on the one hand, it takes aways from them the legitimate power they held in the former political space (party, parliament, and so forth), but, on the other hand, it obliges them to become mere silhouettes, if not marionettes, on the stage of televisual rhetoric. They were thought to be actors of politics, they now often risk, as everyone knows, being no more than TV actors.”

Wear and Tears (tableu of a ageless world)
Specters of Marx (1993)

“This bow I held had killed many men, and it had power, dread power, in its ebony stock.”

ibid
Drenai series, Waylander II: In the Realm of the Wolf

Walt Disney photo

Related topics