
But is it "hostile," really, to take a look at the ferocity of the emotion they call "hostility"?
Paris Review Interview (1986)
2000s, Where the Right Went Wrong (2004)
But is it "hostile," really, to take a look at the ferocity of the emotion they call "hostility"?
Paris Review Interview (1986)
2010s, American Contempt for Liberty (2015)
Source: The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Chapter X (p. 133)
Context: A lesson which history should have taught us thousands of years ago was finally driven home. No man can wield absolute power over other men and still retain his own mind. For no matter how good his intentions are when he takes up the power, his alternate reason is that freedom, the freedom of other people and ultimately his own, terrifies him. Only a man afraid of freedom would want this power, who could conceive of wielding it. And that fear of freedom will turn him into a slave of this power.
Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (University of Chicago Press: 2017), p. 90
“Bureaucracy, the giant power wielded by pigmies, came into the world.”
Les Employés http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Employ%C3%A9s [The Government Clerks] (1838), translated by James Waring; also known as Bureaucracy, or, A Civil Service Reformer.
Context: As routine business must always be dispatched, there is always a fluctuating number of supernumeraries who cannot be dispensed with, and yet are liable to dismissal at a moment's notice. All of these naturally are anxious to be "established clerks." And thus Bureaucracy, the giant power wielded by pigmies, came into the world. Possibly Napoleon retarded its influence for a time, for all things and all men were forced to bend to his will; but none the less the heavy curtain of Bureaucracy was drawn between the right thing to be done and the right man to do it. Bureaucracy was definitely organized, however, under a constitutional government with a natural kindness for mediocrity, a predilection for categorical statements and reports, a government as fussy and meddlesome, in short, as a small shopkeeper's wife.
"The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation," CounterPunch (2008-09-24)
“Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts”
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Context: Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts, and all Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative energy was more than abnormal.