“A general must be a charlatan.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
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Napoleon I of France 259
French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French 1769–1821Related quotes
“The completest charlatan that ever existed.”
Thomas Paine, as quoted in Thomas Paine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-670-03788-5, by Craig Nelson, p. 299.
About
“Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.”
Section 91 http://books.google.com/books?id=pRxBBnyBvcYC&q=%22Charlatanism+of+some+degree+is+indispensable+to+effective+leadership%22&pg=PA116#v=onepage
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice
Context: Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership. There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts.
“Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.”
The First Step http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=145&cat=1
Collected Poems (1992)
Context: Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done is a glorious thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it is a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
It isn't.
Boingboing.net, Jimmy Wales tells "energy workers" that Wikipedia won't publish woo, "the work of lunatic charlatans isn't the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'" http://boingboing.net/2014/03/26/jimmy-wales-tells-energy-wor.html
From an appearance in the Discovery Channel program Alien Planet (14 May 2005)
“Some say I am a good person, some say I am a charlatan — I am just a monk.”
Daily Telegraph interview (2006)
Context: Some say I am a good person, some say I am a charlatan — I am just a monk... I never asked people like Richard Gere to come, but it is foolish to stop them. I have Tibetans, Indians, backpackers, AIDS patients, religious people, politicians, actors and princesses. My attitude is to give everyone some of my time. If I can contribute in any way to their happiness, that makes me happy.
Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)
Context: There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.
