Quotes about power
page 68

“For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)

Literature

“For my own part, I may desire in general to be other than I am; I may condemn and dislike my whole form, and beg of Almighty God for an entire reformation, and that He will please to pardon my natural infirmity: but I ought not to call this repentance, methinks, no more than the being dissatisfied that I am not an angel or Cato. My actions are regular, and conformable to what I am and to my condition; I can do no better; and repentance does not properly touch things that are not in our power; sorrow does.. I imagine an infinite number of natures more elevated and regular than mine; and yet I do not for all that improve my faculties, no more than my arm or will grow more strong and vigorous for conceiving those of another to be so.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 2
Essais (1595), Book III

God, Angels, Imagination, Nature

“Let us examine the language here. Evidently God is addressing this code to a patriarchy that will in turn disseminate it among the less powerful, namely wives and servants. And how long before these servants are downgraded further still…into slaves, even? Ten whole commandments, and not one word against slavery, not to mention bigotry, misogyny, or war.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

"Bible Stories for Adults, No. 31: The Covenant" p. 130 (originally published in What Might Have Been? Volume 1: Alternate Empires, edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

God, War

“The principle is simple and powerful enough to be Marvin's Fourth Great Secret: If what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

Source: The secrets of consulting, 1985, p. 41

Secret, Problem

“Language has an incantory power. The source qualities of language go to the very roots of our experience of poetry.”

David Yezzi (1966) American poet

Interview with Ernest Hibert (2006)

“Always before in moments of crisis I called on that power we call God to help me through. This time, having lost faith in others and my faith in myself, I had lost my hope in God too. Now that hope returned. I really believed that He hadn't wanted me to die.”

Lana Turner (1921–1995) American actress

On the aftermath of her suicide attempt, p. 160.
Autobiography

God, Faith, Hope, Time

“I knew what it was at last—the visible manifestation of my will. My power, inherited from my god ancestors and distilled through generations of humanity, given shape and energy and potential. That was all magic was, really, in the end. Possibility. With it I could create anything, provided I believed.”

N. K. Jemisin book The Broken Kingdoms

Source: The Broken Kingdoms (2011), Chapter 19 “The Demons’ War” (charcoal and chalk on black paper) (p. 349)

God

“At the present time we are the sixth air Power in the world. But every State is rapidly expanding its air force. They are all expanding, but much more rapidly than we are doing. It is certain, therefore, that.. in 1936…we shall have fallen further behind other countries than we are now in air defence. … If you extend your view over the [Government's] five-years' programme I believe it is also true to state that, having regard to the increases which are being made by other countries and which are projected, even if the whole programme is carried out, at the end of the period…we shall be worse off in 1939 relatively—it is relativity that counts in these matters—than we are now. … Yet even for this tiny, timid, tentative, tardy increase of the Air Force, to which the Government have at length made up their mind, they are to be censured by the whole united forces of the Socialist and Liberal parties here and throughout the country.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1934/jul/30/armaments#column_2366 in the House of Commons (30 July 1934) on Labour's motion of censure against the Government for rearming The 1930s

World, Time, Country

“How can I run for office and say I want to be a weak president? We need a strong president, strong enough to resist the temptation of taking power the President shouldn’t have.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

New Hampshire Liberty Forum, February 25, 2007 http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2007/02/25/ron-paul-grassroots-support-proved/ 2000s, 2006-2009

Strong

“You could stand near him, listen to him speak, and feel as if you were in the presence of some wiser man, a true mullah. His uncles were the same. Rich, powerful men whose influence allowed them to profit from the war, not fight in it.”

Kameron Hurley (1980) American writer

Source: God’s War (2011), Chapter 38 (p. 277).

Men, War, Feeling, Fight

“Ascending modern rationalism, in its speculative as well as empirical form, shows a striking contrast between extreme critical radicalism in scientific and philosophic method on the one hand, and an uncritical quietism in the attitude toward established and functioning social institutions. Thus Descartes' ego cogitans was to leave the “great public bodies” untouched, and Hobbes held that “the present ought always to be preferred, maintained, and accounted best.” Kant agreed with Locke in justifying revolution if and when it has succeeded in organizing the whole and in preventing subversion. However, these accommodating concepts of Reason were always contradicted by the evident misery and injustice of the “great public bodies” and the effective, more or less conscious rebellion against them. Societal conditions existed which provoked and permitted real dissociation. from the established state of affairs; a private as well as political dimension was present in which dissociation could develop into effective opposition, testing its strength and the validity of its objectives. With the gradual closing of this dimension by the society, the self-limitation of thought assumes a larger significance. The interrelation between scientific-philosophical and societal processes, between theoretical and practical Reason, asserts itself "behind the back” of the scientists and philosophers. The society bars a whole type of oppositional operations and behavior; consequently, the concepts pertaining to them are rendered illusory or meaningless. Historical transcendence appears as metaphysical transcendence, not acceptable to science and scientific thought. The operational and behavioral point of view, practiced as a “habit of thought” at large, becomes the view of the established universe of discourse and action, needs and aspirations. The “cunning of Reason” works, as it so often did, in the interest of the powers that be. The insistence on operational and behavioral concepts turns against the efforts to free thought and behavior from the given reality and for the suppressed alternatives.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 15-16

Behavior, Reality, Effort, Universe

“Unlimited power is helpless, as arbitrary power is capricious. Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We can attempt nothing great, but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter: we can persevere in nothing great, but from a pride in overcoming them.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

No. 156
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)

Sense, Perseverance

“Karma is the eternal assertion of human freedom. If we can bring ourselves down by our karma, surely it is in our power to raise ourselves by our own karma.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Freedom

“Many observers have exposed the democracy deficits of the international and domestic order; identified threats to international peace; warned against the military-industrial and military-financial complexes; and denounced the retrogression in social justice associated with so-called “austerity measures”. The diagnoses of think tanks universities and researchers are fairly clear, their recommendations sensible and implementable, but changing the status quo has proven difficult, primarily because of lack of transparency and accountability in political processes, and because of powerful vested interests. Not without irony it has been noted that often those who are elected do not govern, and those who do govern are not elected.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Alfred de Zayas' comments to the remarks made by NGOs and States during the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council Session http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=13713&LangID=E Comments by Alfred de Zayas, Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, following the Interactive Dialogue on the presentation of his thematic report. 2013

Peace, Justice, Democracy, Thinking

“The idea that money begets money, and that the rich and powerful enjoy unfair advantages, goes against what we are taught - or like to believe - about the capitalist system.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 9, Square Versus Oblong, p. 280

Money, Idea

“In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side — there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

from Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 104.

Music

“A leader's intelligence must have simplicity and clarity; action is difficult when the mind is full of complex theories and schemes. An over-organized industry wastes just as much money as one without organization - the transmission uses up all the motor's power. (For this reason small enterprises directed by one man have the better of larger trusts because their costs are less and the quality of their product higher.) A leader must have a few very simple ideas, acquired from experience and confirmed by putting them into practice. This structure created by experience will contain much exact knowledge for use in connection with a given action.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Leadership

Money, Intelligence, Idea, Knowledge

“Bismarck is the king's last mistress because only such a creature could have such power over an old man.”

Alfred von Waldersee (1832–1904) Prussian Field Marshal

Waldersee c. 1887 http://www.tracesofevil.com/1999/10/revision-notes-about-bismarck.html

“[on zapatistas] The goal has never been to defeat the state and claim sovereign authority but rather to change the world without taking power.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

85
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

World, Change

“What was the origin of our slave population? The evil commenced when we were in our Colonial state, but acts were passed by our Colonial Legislature, prohibiting the importation, of more slaves, into the Colony. These were rejected by the Crown. We declared our independence, and the prohibition of a further importation was among the first acts of state sovereignty. Virginia was the first state which instructed her delegates to declare the colonies independent. She braved all dangers. From Quebec to Boston, and from Boston to Savannah, Virginia shed the blood of her sons. No imputation then can be cast upon her in this matter. She did all that was in her power to do, to prevent the extension of slavery, and to mitigate its evils.”

James Monroe (1758–1831) American politician, 5th President of the United States (in office from 1817 to 1825)

Speech in the Virginia State Convention for altering the Constitution https://books.google.com/books?id=R9ctAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA78&dq=%22The+evil+commenced+when+we+were+in+our+Colonial+state%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CD8Q6AEwBmoVChMIwM7FxfHTxwIViPM-Ch3fiQrs#v=onepage&q=%22The%20evil%20commenced%20when%20we%20were%20in%20our%20Colonial%20state%22&f=false (2 November 1829)

Evil

“As economic libertarians, these people believe that markets should be free, formed by the rational actions of rational agents - who need only to be provided with perfect information about goods and services in order to build a stable economy. As technological utopians, they believe that everything will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, if technology is modelled on the American dream and the American way. And as opinion formers, they claim no formal power base, operating instead by linking exhaustively to one another.”

Bill Thompson (1960) English technology writer, born 1960

" Blog eats blog: The rise of the blogeoisie. http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006DDA4.htm" by Bill Thompson, May 15, 2003.

People, World, Dreams, Way

“As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world…”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

World

“The influence of consumerism has led us to confuse institutions for people, means for the mission, and programs for the Spirit's power.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

People

“While it is much preferable to anarchy, government cannot abolish the evils of the human condition. At any time the state is only one of the forces that shape human behaviour, and its power is never absolute. At present, fundamentalist religion and organized crime, ethnic-national allegiances and market forces all have the ability to elude the control of government, sometimes to overthrow or capture it. States are at the mercy of events as much as any other human institution, and over the longer course of history all of them fail. As Spinoza recognized, there is no reason to think the cycle of order and anarchy will ever end. Secular thinkers find this view of human affairs dispiriting, and most have retreated to some version of the Christian view in which history is a narrative of redemption. The most common of these narratives are theories of progress, in which the growth of knowledge enables humanity to advance and improve its condition. Actually, humanity cannot advance or retreat, for humanity cannot act: there is no collective entity with intentions or purposes, only ephemeral struggling animals each with its own passions and illusions. The growth of scientific knowledge cannot alter this fact. Believers in progress – whether social democrats or neo-conservatives, Marxists, anarchists or technocratic Positivists – think of ethics and politics as being like science, with each step forward enabling further advances in future. Improvement in society is cumulative, they believe, so that the elimination of one evil can be followed by the removal of others in an open-ended process. But human affairs show no sign of being additive in this way: what is gained can always be lost, sometimes –as with the return of torture as an accepted technique in war and government – in the blink of an eye. Human knowledge tends to increase, but humans do not become any more civilized as a result. They remain prone to every kind of barbarism, and while the growth of knowledge allows them to improve their material conditions, it also increases the savagery of their conflicts.”

John Gray book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 264-5)
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)

War, Religion, Way, History

“I doubt that Fidel will ever come back to power. I think he is slowly going to the great beyond. Too slowly... he could have gone a long time ago.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Dutch television interview (March 1, 2007)
2007, 2008

Thinking, Time

“America is a great force for freedom and prosperity. Yet our greatness is not measured in power or luxuries, but by who we are and how we treat one another. So we strive to be a compassionate, decent, hopeful society.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2006, State of the Union (January 2006)

Hope, Freedom

“Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it — be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Art, Understanding

“It is simply, and solely, the abundance of money within a state [which] makes the difference in its grandeur and power.”

Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) French politician

Arthur John Sargent (1899), The Economic Policy of Colbert. p. 65

Money

“He (Gauis Gracchus) was a political incendiary. Not only was the hundred years' revolution which dates from him, so far as it was one man's work, the work of Gaius Gracchus, but he was above all the true founder of that terrible civic proletariat flattered and paid by the classes above it, which was through it aggregation in the capital - the natural consequence of the largesses of corn - at once utterly demoralized and made conscious of its power, and which - with its pretensions, sometimes stupid, sometimes knavish, and its talk of the sovereignty of the people - lay like an incubus for five hundred years upon the Roman commonwealth and only perished along with it. And yet again, this greatest of political transgressors was the regenerator of his country. There is scarce a fruitful idea in Roman monarchy, which is not traceable to Gaius Gracchus.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The History of Rome - Volume 3

People, Stupidity, Idea, Nature

“Nasiru-d din [Subuktigin] died in the year AH 387 (AD 997) and the command of his troops descended to Mahmud by inheritance, and by confirmation of Nuh, son of Mansur. His victory over 'Abdu-l Malik, when that chieftain was put to flight, added much to his power, and he was confirmed in the government of Khorasan and Sijistan, and he received a robe of honour with the title of Sultan from the Khalif, who also made a treaty with him. In consequence of the complaints of the oppression practised by the descendants of Fakhru-d din Dailami, he marched towards Júrjan and 'Irak, and took the country from them. Afterwards he turned his arms towards Hind, and conquered many of its cities and forts. He demolished the Hindu temples and gave prevalence to the Muhammadan faith. He ruled with great justice, and he stands unparalleled among all the Muhammadan kings.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

‘Abu Sa‘id ‘Abdullah bin ‘Abu’l Hasan ‘Ali Baizawi : Nizamu’t-Tawarikh in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 255
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

Faith, Justice, Victory, Country

“My next proposition is that the North is in the course of acquiring this power to abolish slavery. Is that true? I say, gentlemen, the North is acquiring that power by two processes, one of which is operating with great rapidity-that is by the admission of new States. The public territory is capable of forming from twenty to thirty States of larger size than the average of the States now in the Union. The public territory is peculiarly Northern territory, and every State that comes into the Union will be a free State. We may rest assured, sit, that that is a fixed fact. The events in Kansas should satisfy every one of the truth of that. If causes now in operation are allowed to continue, the admission of new States will go on until a sufficient number shall have been secured to give the necessary preponderance to change the Constitution. There is a process going on by which some of our own slave States are becoming free States already. It is true, that in some of the slave States the slave population is actually on the decrease, and, I believe it is true of all of them that it is relatively to the white population on the decrease. The census shows that slaves are decreasing in Delaware and Maryland; and it shows that in the other States in the same parallel, the relative state of the decrease and increase is against the slave population. It is not wonderful that this should be so. The anti-slavery feeling has got to be so great at the North that the owners of slave property in these States have a presentiment that it is a doomed institution, and the instincts of self-interest impels them to get rid of that property which is doomed. The consequence is, that it will go down lower and. lower, until it all gets to the Cotton States-until it gets to the bottom. There is the weight of a continent upon it forcing it down. Now, I say, sir, that under this weight it is bound to go down unto the Cotton States, one of which I have the honor to represent here. When that time comes, sir, the free States in consequence of the manifest decrease, will urge the process with additional vigor, and I fear that the day is not distant when the Cotton States, as they are called, will be the only slave States. When that time comes, the time will have arrived when the North will have the power to amend the Constitution, and say that slavery shall be abolished, and if the master refuses to yield to this policy, he shall doubtless be hung for his disobedience.”

Henry L. Benning (1814–1875) Confederate Army general

Speech to the Virginia Convention (1861)

Truth, Fear, Feeling, Distant

“…whereas the vices of Messalina were in themselves venial, being mostly a passion for sensual gratification which subordinated all things to its encompassing, Agrippina lived solely for power, frightening enough in a man but terrifying in a woman…. she would sleep with anyone, though not for physical pleasure, only for political advantage. She was cursed or blessed with a certain sexual coldness, knowing as much as a temple prostitute about the arousing of male passion and the procurement of its ecstatic release but keeping herself aloof, despite an occasional simulation of desire and the odd false orgiastic shudder and scream of fulfilment, from a process she found distressingly bestial when it was not frankly comic.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)

Pleasure, Sleep, Passion, Falseness

“Foolish critics often betray their ignorance by saying that a painter or a writer "only copies what he has seen, or puts down what he has known." They forget that no man imagines what he has not seen or known, and that it is in the selection of the characteristic details that the artistic power is manifested.”

George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) British philosopher

The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)

Imagination, Forgetting

“Oh I’m on my way, I know I am,
Somewhere not so far from here
All I know is all I feel right now,
I feel the power growing in my hair
Sitting on my own not by myself,
Everybody’s here with me
I don’t need to touch your face to know,
And I don’t need to use my eyes to see”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Sitting
Song lyrics, Catch Bull at Four (1972)

Way, Feeling

“In the Prime Minister, we have a man who has forfeited the right to be believed or to be trusted. In more than 20 years in politics, he has betrayed every cause he believed in, contradicted every statement he has made, broken every promise he has given and breached every agreement that he has entered into. In 1982, the Prime Minister said that we would negotiate a withdrawal from the EEC. In 1994, he said: "Under my leadership, I will never allow this country to be isolated." In 1996, he said that he had made it clear that if it is in Britain's interest to be isolated then we will be isolated. There is a lifetime of U-turns, errors and sell-outs. All those hon. Members who sit behind the Prime Minister and wonder whether they stand for anything any longer, or whether they defend any point of principle, know who has led them to that sorry state. In one of his frequent meetings with the former leader of the Liberal party, whom he so much preferred to meeting his own Cabinet, the Prime Minister told us as it is. He said that he had taken from his party everything they thought they believed in and had stripped them of their core beliefs and that what kept them together was power.”

William Hague (1961) British politician

6 December 2000, House of Commons, Prime Minister's Questions.

Error, Country

“Chutzpah factor: Self-righteousness, arrogance, and a sense of superiority so great that gross double-standards seem entirely reasonable and no self-interested action is beyond rationalization. This factor is positively correlated with size, power, and per capita income.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: Beyond Hypocrisy, 1992, Doublespeak Dictionary (within Beyond Hypocrisy), p. 125.

Sense

“Believe it or not, after the Second Vatican Council anticlericalism is a Catholic virtue. In elaborating a theology of laity, as many call it, and speaking of a hierarchy of service rather than of domination in the Church, Vatican II implicitly endorsed opposition to clericalism, which is a policy of maintaining or increasing the power of a religious hierarchy. Clearly, this sort of anticlericalism has nothing to do with the other anticlericalism.”

Leon Bertoletti (1971)

The A-Word http://www.hicsuntleones.co.uk/2008/10/a-word.html, Hic Sunt Leones, 22/10/2008

“The people can never understand why the President does not use his powers to make them behave. Well all the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Letter to Mary Jane Truman (14 November 1947)

People, Understanding, Kiss, Time

“The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other vist the human race.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter VII, paragraph 20, lines 2-4

Death

“[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.”

Jamie Zawinski (1968) American programmer

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=33F4D777.7BF84EA3%40netscape.com
Google
Groups.

“Art is something absolute, something positive, which gives power just as food gives power.
While creative science is a mental food, art is the satisfaction of the soul.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 56
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Food, Art, Soul, Science

“God, Whose hand holds stars, as we lump earth
In our fingers, give us power, give us light
To hold all love within our breast's small space.”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953)

Love, God, Star, Light

“Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

Religion, Science, Change

“If I am asked about the photographer’s role in our times, the power of the image and so on, I do not want to launch into explanations. I only know that people who know how to look are as rare as those who know how to listen.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, To Seize Life: Interview with Yvonne Baby (1961), p. 45

People, Time

“This shifted the centre of a truly Hellenic civilization to the east, to the Aegean, the Ionian littoral of Asia Minor and to Constantinople. It also meant that modem Greeks could hardly count as being of ancient Greek descent, even if this could never be ruled out.’ There is a sense in which the preceding discussion is both relevant to a sense of Greek identity, now and earlier, and irrelevant. It is relevant in so far as Greeks, now and earlier, felt that their ‘Greekness’ was a product of their descent from the ancient Greeks (or Byzantine Greeks), and that such filiations made them feel themselves to be members of one great ‘super-family’ of Greeks, shared sentiments of continuity and membership being essential to a lively sense of identity. It is irrelevant in that ethnies arc constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i. e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population. In that sense much has been retained, and revived, from the extant heritage of ancient Greece. For, even at the time of Slavic migrations, in Ionia and especially in Constantinople, there was a growing emphasis on the Greek language, on Greek philosophy and literature, and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such a ‘Greek revival’ was to surface again in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as subsequently, providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 29: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

Family, Feeling, Literature, Sense

“Life begins perpetually. Gathered together at last under the leadership of man, the student-teacher of the universe… unified, disciplined, armed with the secret powers of the atom, and with knowledge as yet beyond dreaming, Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.”

H. G. Wells book The Outline of History

Source: The Outline of History (1920), Ch. 41

Life, Secret, Dreams, Star

“Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

Decision, Help

“Almost all governments and known figures strongly condemned this incident [the September 11 attacks]. But then a propaganda machine came into full force; it was implied that the whole world was exposed to a huge danger, namely terrorism, and that the only way to save the world would be to deploy forces into Afghanistan. Eventually Afghanistan, and, shortly thereafter, Iraq were occupied.… In identifying those responsible for the attack, there were three viewpoints: (1) That a very powerful and complex terrorist group, able to successfully cross all layers of the American intelligence and security, carried out the attack. This is the main viewpoint advocated by American statesmen. (2) That some segments within the U. S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime. The majority of the American people as well as other nations and politicians agree with this view. (3) It was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation. Apparently, this viewpoint has fewer proponents.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Speech to the United Nations General Assembly http://www.politicaltheatrics.net/2010/09/transcript-of-president-mahmoud-ahmadinejads-un-speech/ (22 September 2010). CNN and other American news agencies reported the emphasized remark as Ahmadinejad's expression of a personal belief. 2010

People, World, Way, Intelligence

“In a totalitarian state, the purpose of politics is power and power alone. The "nation" and its peoples are mentioned only to give an air of legitimacy to the application of power. The people accept this devalued existence, asking only to live from day to day.”

Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017) Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist

"On Living with Dignity in China"
No Enemies, No Hate: Selected Essays and Poems

People

“Now, we are poor people, individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.
We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda — fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, I've Been to the Mountaintop (1968)

God, Children, People, World

“This [mammonist] mindset is embodied and reaches its acme in international plutocracy. The chief source of power for Mammonism is the effortless and endless income that is produced through interest.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

"Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money" (1919)

“The intelligence is clear: [Saddam Hussein] continues to believe that his weapons of mass destruction programme is essential both for internal repression and for external aggression. It is essential to his regional power. Prior to the inspectors coming back in, he was engaged in a systematic exercise in concealment of those weapons.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Hansard http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo030225/debtext/30225-05.htm#30225-05_head0, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 400, col. 123. House of Commons statement on Iraq, 25 February 2003. 2000s

Exercises, Intelligence

“Legally and to outward seeming the American President is the successor of Washington, and still enjoys powers devised and limited by the Convention of Philadelphia. In reality the new President differs from the Magistrate imagined by the Fathers of the Republic as widely as Monarchy from Democracy…”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

p, 125
The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

Democracy, Imagination, Reality

“The very existence of the Nation was threatened. Threatened on all sides, from the interior and exterior.
From the interior, by the sterile conflicts of politicians who sacrificed the country and their compatriots to their own interests.
Nothing counted for them but power…and what the exercise of power could bring them. Fill their own pockets, exploit the Congo and the Congolese, this was their trademark.
Given such examples, both national and provincial administrations were mired in inertia, inefficiency, and worse yet, corruption.
At all levels, many of those in our country who held a morsel of public power allowed themselves to be corrupted, served individuals and companies who paid bribes and neglected the others…
…certain politicians, to maintain themselves in power or to regain it, did not hesitate to seek help from foreign powers…
…the social, economic and financial situation of the country is catastrophic.”

Mobutu Sésé Seko (1930–1997) President of Zaïre

Mobutu explaining the reasons behind his November 1965 coup. Young and Turner, p. 42

Exercises, Help, Country

“We must give the system sufficient factors of stability to enable it to work; but we must not assume that these forces are so powerful as to prevent the system from being liable to fluctuations. There must be a tendency to rigidity of certain prices, particularly wage-rates; but there must also be a tendency to rigidity of certain price-expectations as well, in order to provide an explanation for the rigidity of these prices… Indeed we should do better to assume a good deal of variation in different people’s elasticities of expectations… Of course the way in which a population is divided with respect to this sort of sensitivity will vary very much in different circumstances… We have to be prepared to deal with a range of possible cases, varying from that of a settled community, which has been accustomed to steady conditions in the past (and which, for that reason, is not easily disturbed in the present), to that of a community which has been exposed to violent disturbances of prices (and which may have to be regarded, in consequence, as being economically neurotic.”

John Hicks (1904–1989) British economist

Source: Value and capital, (1939), p. 271–2; as cited in: Roberto Scazzieri, ‎Amartya Sen, ‎Stefano Zamagni (2008) Markets, Money and Capital: Hicksian Economics for the Twenty First Century, p. 161

People, Way, Communication, Past

“I wrote A Wrinkle in Time when we were living in a small dairy farm village in New England. I had three small children to raise, and life was not easy. We lost four of our closest friends within two years by death — that's a lot of death statistically. And I really wasn't finding the answers to my big questions in the logical places. So, at the time I discovered the world of particle physics. I discovered Einstein and relativity. I read a book of Einstein's, in which he said that anyone who's not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. And I thought, "Oh, I've found my theologian, what a wonderful thing."”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)

Life, Death, Children, Books

“Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first words which arouse within him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of his prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak, comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter I-V, Chapter II.

Life, World, Understanding, Study

“The student of the Differential Calculus may… be brought to think it possible that the terms and ideas which that science requires may exist in his own mind in the same rude form as that of a straight line in the conceptions of a beginner in geometry. …he must be prepared to stop his course until he can form exact notions, acquire precise ideas, both of resemblance between those things which have appeared most distinct, and of distinction between those which have appeared most alike. To do this… formal definitions would be useless; for he cannot be supposed to have one single notion in that precise form which would make it worth while to attach it to a word. One reason of the great difficulty which is found in treatises on this subject… the tacit assumption that nothing is necessary previously to actually embodying the terms and rules of the science, as if mere statement of definitions could give instantaneous power of using terms rightly. We shall here attempt… a wider degree of verbal explanation than is usual with the view of enabling the student to come to the definitions in some state of previous preparation.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Idea, Thinking, Appearance, Science

“It is quite clear that if by sudden attack by an Enemy landed in strength our Dock-yards were to be destroyed our Maritime Power would for more than half a century be paralysed, and our Colonies, our commerce, and the Subsistence of a large Part of our Population would be at the Mercy of our Enemy, who would be sure to shew us no Mercy—we should be reduced to the Rank of a third Rate Power if no worse happened to us. That such a Landing is in the present State of Things possible must be manifest. No Naval Force of ours can effectually prevent it. … One night is enough for the Passage to our Coast, and Twenty Thousand men might be landed at any Point before our Fleet knew that the Enemy was out of Harbour. There could be no security against the simultaneous Landing of 20,000 for Portsmouth 20,000 for Plymouth and 20,000 for Ireland our Troops would necessarily be scattered about the United Kingdom, and with Portsmouth and Plymouth as they now are those Two dock yards and all they contain would be entered and burnt before Twenty Thousand Men could be brought together to defend either of them. … if these defensive works are necessary, it is manifest that they ought to be made with the least possible delay; to spread their Completion over 20 or 30 years would be Folly unless we could come to an agreement with a chivalrous Antagonist, not to molest us till we could inform him we were quite ready to repel his attack—we are told that these works might, if money were forthcoming be finished possibly in three at latest in four years. Long enough this to be kept in a State of imperfect Defence.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Letter to Gladstone (15 December 1859), quoted in Philip Guedalla (ed.), Gladstone and Palmerston, being the Correspondence of Lord Palmerston with Mr. Gladstone 1851-1865 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1928), pp. 115-117.
1850s

Men, Money, Parting, Night

“While the politicians espouse their rhetoric designed to preserve their reputations and their political power, our soldiers die!”

Ricardo Sanchez (1953) United States Army Lieutenant General

Reporters and editors luncheon address (2007)

“It is natural that I should bear entire responsibility for the war in general, and, needless to say, I am prepared to do so. Consequently, now that the war has been lost, it is presumably necessary that I be judged so that the circumstances of the time can be clarified and the future peace of the world be assured. Therefore, with respect to my trial, it is my intention to speak frankly, according to my recollection, even though when the vanquished stands before the victor, who has over him the power of life and death, he may be apt to toady and flatter. I mean to pay considerable attention to this in my actions, and say to the end that what is true is true and what is false is false. To shade one's words in flattery to the point of untruthfulness would falsify the trial and do incalculable harm to the nation, and great care must be taken to avoid this.”

Hideki Tōjō (1884–1948) former Prime Minister of Japan and Minister of War executed in 1948

Written in his prison diary https://books.google.com/books?id=aynFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA217&lpg=PA217&dq=%22I+should+bear+entire+responsibility+for+the+war+in+general%22&source=bl&ots=ov6_NlNuJx&sig=W_gAxNsPYqUMqh-FE1WF4CbCQ-8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QZHsVMKlLsKiNrnDg6AP&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22I%20should%20bear%20entire%20responsibility%20for%20the%20war%20in%20general%22&f=false, as quoted in The Imperial Japanese Army: The Invincible Years 1941–42 https://books.google.com/books?id=LTZfBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA337&lpg=PA337&dq=%22I+should+bear+entire+responsibility+for+the+war+in+general%22&source=bl&ots=wiF4ARAlht&sig=EjofLr6zBGo9YG4b0dBGjL91VB0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QZHsVMKlLsKiNrnDg6AP&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=%22I%20should%20bear%20entire%20responsibility%20for%20the%20war%20in%20general%22&f=false (2014), by Bill Yenne, Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford Publishing, p. 337. 1940s

Life, Death, War, World

“Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the entire "international community". We kept publishing. I was put in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA getting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, we won and got him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with string. Perhaps there are no elephants.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

Repubblica.it interview, 23 Dec 2016 link http://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2016/12/23/news/assange_wikileaks-154754000/

Communication, Housing

“If there is a single power the West underestimates, it is the power of collective hatred.”

Ralph Peters (1952) American military officer, writer, pundit

Source: 1990s, Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? (1999), p. 13

“Even so, one step from my grave,
I believe that cruelty, spite,
The powers of darkness will in time
Be crushed by the spirit of light.”

Borís Pasternak (1890–1960) Russian writer

Selected Poems (1983), Nobel Prize

Light, Time

“We have been hurt more morally that physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. We still pray that you continue to be president of the U. S. A. We Endeavour and hope that you will gain victory in the new election campaigne. You are a man who has enough courage to annul a wrong and mistaken action. I am sure that you are able to shoulder the responsibility for that. Enough evidence is available, Bearing in mind that you are the president of the strongest power in the world nowadays, and since Nato is waging an unjust war against a small people of a developing country. This country had already been subjected to embargo and sanctions, furthermore it also suffered a direct military armed aggression during Reagan’s time. This country is Libya. Hence, to serving world peace … Friendship between our peoples … and for the sake of economic, and security cooperation against terror, you are in a position to keep Nato off the Libyan affair for good.”

Muammar Gaddafi book The Green Book

The Green Book (1975), Letter to Barack Obama

Friendship, War, People, World

“As to the allegation of the Communist that religion makes men passive, we have only to observe that the dynamic power of religious convictions is precisely what prevents a soundly religious person from accepting Communist oppression and Communist mandates. A person practicing the teachings of the Judaic-Christian philosophy will not lie or steal on command. He will not shed innocent blood. He will not participate in the diabolical Communist practice of genocide - the systematic extermination of entire nations or classes. It is clearly evident from the numerous Communist writings that what they fear in religion is not that it makes religious people passive to the dominant class but that it prevents them from becoming passive to Communist discipline. Deep spiritual convictions stand like a wall of resistance to challenge the teachings and practices of Communism. Furthermore, the Communist sees in the dynamic ideology of Judaic-Christian teachings a force for peace which cuts through the vitals of Communism's campaign for world-wide revolution.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Men, People, Lie, World

“An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged: no harm can be done.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Mansfield Park (1814)
Works, Mansfield Park

Feeling

“While thinking when sober, our success at reaching our goals by using the First Baltic Front troops, the Memel operation, it can't be disregarded, that they [the troops] not only honorably accomplished their powerful strategic operation, but also an infusion of victory for the Soviet armed forces and an entrance into the final stages of the war.”

Hovhannes Bagramyan (1897–1982) Soviet military commander

Quoted in "I. C. Bagramyan: A Photo Album About A Soviet Marshal" - Yerevan - 1987

War, Thinking, Success, Victory

“The health of the soul is to have its faculties, reason, high spirit and desire happily tempered, with the reason in command and reining in the other two, like restive horses. The special name of this health is temperance, that is σωφροσύνη or “thought-preserving,” for it creates a preservation of one of our powers, namely that of wise-thinking.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

171.
On the Virtues

Health, Soul, Thinking, Horse

“The ranchers want to keep us divided in order to keep us weak. Many of us have signed individual "work contracts" with the ranchers or contractors, contracts in which they had all power. These contracts were farces, one more cynical joke at our impotence. That is why we must get together and bargain collectively. We must use the only strength that we have, the force of our numbers. The ranchers are few; we are many. United we shall stand.”

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist

The Plan of Delano (1965)

“We think in America that it is necessary to introduce the people into every department of government as far as they are capable of exercising it; and that this is the only way to ensure a long-continued and honest administration of it's powers. 1. They are not qualified to exercise themselves the EXECUTIVE department: but they are qualified to name the person who shall exercise it. With us therefore they chuse this officer every 4. years. 2. They are not qualified to LEGISLATE. With us therefore they only chuse the legislators. 3. They are not qualified to JUDGE questions of law; but they are very capable of judging questions of fact. In the form of JURIES therefore they determine all matters of fact, leaving to the permanent judges to decide the law resulting from those facts. Butwe all know that permanent judges acquire an esprit de corps; that, being known, they are liable to be tempted by bribery; that they are misled by favor, by relationship, by a spirit of party, by a devotion to the executive or legislative; that it is better to leave a cause to the decision of cross and pile than to that of a judge biased to one side; and that the opinion of twelve honest jurymen gives still a better hope of right than cross and pile does. It is left therefore, to the juries, if they think the permanent judges are under any bias whatever in any cause, to take on themselves to judge the law as well as the fact. They never exercise this power but when they suspect partiality in the judges; and by the exercise of this power they have been the firmest bulwarks of English liberty.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to the Abbé Arnoux (19 July 1787) https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-15-02-0275 1780s

People, Law, Hope, Way

“If I realised the power of magic to worry and terrify people before, then I certainly would have used it before. Everyone freezes before it for different reasons – perhaps because it means madness to them, or because it means opening the door to a whole lot of stuff that the Age of Reason should have firmly bolted the door upon. A lot of concepts that we got rid of a long time ago that would be a bit creepy to have them back.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

People, Age, Time, Madness

“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Variant translation: Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.
IV, 3.
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV

Men, Art, Soul, Mountain

“Through a carefully cultivated display of intimidation to anyone who contemplated a meaningful challenge, the [United States] government had striven to show poeple around the world that its power was constrained by neither law nor ethics, neither morality nor the Constitution: look what we can do and will do to those who impede our agenda.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Penguin Books 2015 edition ISBN 978-0-241-97289-2, pages 83-84.
No Place to Hide (2014)

World, Law

“Mexican sculpture, as soon as I found it, seemed to me true and right, perhaps because I at once hit on similarities in it with some eleventh-century carvings I had seen as a boy on Yorkshire churches. Its 'stoniness', by which I mean its truth to material, its tremendous power without loss of sensitiveness, its astonishing variety and fertility of form-invention and its approach to a full three-dimensional conception of form, makes it unsurpassed in my opinion by any other period of stone sculpture.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Henri Moore in 'The Listener', 24 April 1941, pp. 598-9; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, p. 104
1940 - 1955

Truth, Boy, Loss

“The strength of the imagination, its enriching power and excitement, lies in its interplay with reality—physical and emotional.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

Imagination, Reality

“Our first of poets was one of our first of men. He was an eminent instance to prove that a poet is not another name for the slave of power and fashion … who merely aspire to make up the pageant and show of the day. There are persons in common life who … can so little bear to be left for any length of time out of the grand carnival and masquerade of pride and folly, that they will gain admittance to it at the expense of their characters … Milton was not one of these. He had lofty contemplative principle, and consciousness of inward power and worth, [not] to be tempted by such idle baits.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Milton's Sonnets" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Life, Men, Fashion, Time

“Campbell (1979) has shown how the learning theory developed in the tight research group surrounding Kenneth Spence was less powerful than the learning theory developed within the much looser group surrounding Edward Tolman. These differences are explained in part by the relative ease people in Tolman's group had evaluating and changing ideas without regard for the effect of these changes on their reputations and the relative difficulty people in Spence's group had when they tried to do the same thing.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Karl E. Weick, " Drop your tools : An allegory for organizational studies http://www19.homepage.villanova.edu/gregory.gull/MBA8510.html/DropTools_Weick.htm." Administrative Science Quarterly. v41 n2. Jun 1996. p. 301-31 1980s-1990s

People, Idea, Learning, Change

“I shouldn’t be naive” Diana said. “Of course, realising its destructive power only makes them want it more. Of course. Even more than great wealth, power craves technologies of destruction. Good to be wealthy, but better to remain in power—and the more awe-inspiring the weaponry at your disposal, the better able you are to do that.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 14, “The Third Letter of the Alphabet” (pp. 259-260).
Jack Glass (2012)

Wealth

“Real success in business is to be found in achievements comparable rather with those of the artist or the scientist, of the inventor or statesman. And the joys sought in the profession of business must be like their joys and not the mere vulgar satisfaction which is experienced in the acquisition of money, in the exercise of power or in the frivolous pleasure of mere winning.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

"Business — The New Profession", La Follette's Weekly Magazine, Volume 4, No. 47 (November 23, 1912), p. 7.
Extra-judicial writings

Money, Pleasure, Exercises, Business

“A third story, about a 12th century king Harsha of Kashmir, is apparently true but has nothing to do with religious persecution: he plundered Hindu temples of all sects including Buddhism, in his own kingdom, without bothering to desecrate them or their keepers apart from lucrative plunder. It is the one geunine case of a ruler plundering not out of religious motives but for the gold. There is no known case of a Muslim marauder who merely stole from temples without bothering to explicity desecrate them, much less of a Muslim ruler who plundered the sanctuaries of his own religion. Moreover, Kalhana's history book Rajatarangini relates this story with the comment: "Promoted by the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk." This Harsha employed Turkish mercenaries (which his successors would regret, for they spied and ultimately grabbed power), and these Muslims already had a firm reputation of plundering temples with a good conscience.”

Harsha of Kashmir

Elst, Koenraad Negationism in India: concealing the record of Islam. 1992

Books, Religion, History, Motivation

“Among other things Jonestown was an example of a definition well known to sociologists of religion: a cult is a religion with no political power.”

Tom Wolfe book In Our Time

"Entr'actes and Canapes"
In Our Time (1980)

Religion

“Monckton Milnes was a social power in London, and of course he himself affected social eccentricity, challenging ridicule with the indifference of one who knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of men — of a great many men. A word from him went far. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his almost Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad, and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high for the audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Men, Intelligence, Question, Indifference

“Her (India’s) great curse is caste; but English education has already proved a tremendous power in levelling the injurious distinctions of caste.”

Keshub Chunder Sen (1838–1884) Indian academic

Speech at Hannover Square Rooms on the occasion of a Soiree held to welcome him on 12th April 1870.

Education

“The Truth that is to be Realized may be summarized simply as the Realization that no matter what is arising, no matter how many others are present, there is only One Being. This is precisely different from the childish but common religious notion that even when you are alone there is always Someone Else present, Who will look out for you if you do the right thing. True freedom is not a matter of striking a deal with an All-Powerful Parental Deity; no such God exists. True freedom is in the Realization that there is only God and You are That One.”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/index.html

God, Truth, Parent, Freedom

“People with real power never fear of losing it. People with control think of little else.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

"Mom, He's Doing It Again..", at Whedonesque.com (10 November 2007) http://whedonesque.com/comments/14699#more

People, Fear, Thinking

“This lesson was firmly in the minds of those who made the American Constitution. They proposed to adopt institutions under which the people should be supreme, and the government should derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. They were determined to be a sovereign people under a government having such powers as they from time to time should confer upon it by a written constitution. They did not propose to be under the tyranny of either the executive or the legislature.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

People, Time

“If it was possible for men who exercise their reason, to believe that the divine Author of our existence intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over others, marked out by his infinite goodness and wisdom, as the objects of a legal domination never rightfully resistible, however severe and oppressive, the inhabitants of these Colonies might at least require from the Parliament of Great Britain some evidence, that this dreadful authority over them has been granted to that body. But a reverence for our great Creator, principles of humanity, and the dictates of common sense, must convince all those who reflect upon the subject, that Government was instituted to promote the welfare of mankind, and ought to be administered for the attainment of that end.”

John Dickinson (1732–1808) American politician

Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (6 July 1775)

Wisdom, Men, Exercises, Sense

“As the night passed, Rifle updated me on the readiness of our forces, the locations of our aircraft carrier battle groups, and the "Global power" timelines for missions by B-2 stealth bombers flying from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. I had received an intelligence alert that as many as thirty additional terrorist strikes were possible worldwide. But there had been no more attacks… so far. Maybe this was because we'd buttoned up, sealing our vulnerabilities by going to Threat Con Delta. By now, CNN was running tape of President Bush flying back to Andrews and landing in Marine One on the White House lawn. The immediate crisis was over: the President was back in the Oval Office, the Secretary of Defense was in the wounded Pentagon. America was putting on her "game face."”

Tommy Franks (1945) United States Army general

I was proud of my country.
Source: American Soldier (2004), p. 247

Game, Intelligence, Housing, Flying

“Oh, there are evil moments in our life,
When but a thought, a word, a look, has power
To dash the cup of happiness aside,
And stamp us wretched!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Life, Happiness, Evil

“Thought is just not something objective in our heads. Thought is power – real, objective power. Moreover, the thoughts we create have a life of their own. They have a kind of material reality that affects other people for good or ill – hence our responsibility to chose.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

The Power of Thought: A Twenty-First Century Adaptation of Annie Besant's http://books.google.co.in/books?id=SVKqq0dTdSMC&printsec=frontcover, p. backcover

Life, People, Reality

“The Iranian regime knows it lacks the military power and the political support needed to seize direct control in any Arab state, least of all Iraq. This is why it plans to create a state-within-a-state situation — where the formal government in Baghdad, like the formal governments in Beirut or Damascus, will be an empty shell, with real power exercised by heavily armed and well-funded groups linked to Tehran. These Iranian-controlled groups would command chunks of territory while letting Sunni jihadists set up shop in their own neck of the woods. In other words, Iran is not aiming to defeat IS, let alone destroy it. All Tehran wants is to create a safe corridor through Iraqi territory to Syria and thence to Lebanon.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

We’re letting Iran and ISIS carve up Iraq http://nypost.com/2015/03/15/were-letting-iran-and-isis-carve-up-iraq/, New York Post (March 15, 2015). New York Post

Exercises, Support

“Offensive realism predicts that the United States will send its army across the Atlantic when there is a potential hegemon in Europe that the local great powers cannot contain by themselves.”

John Mearsheimer book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Source: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), Chapter 7, The Offshore Balancers, p. 252

“The result of this mental dullness is that inner vacuity and emptiness that is stamped on innumerable faces and also betrays itself in a constant and lively attention to all events in the external world, even the most trivial. This vacuity is the real source of boredom and always craves for external excitement in order to set the mind and spirits in motion through something. Therefore in the choice thereof it is not fastidious, as is testified by the miserable and wretched pastimes to which people have recourse. … The principal result of this inner vacuity is the craze for society, diversion, amusement, and luxury of every kind which lead many to extravagance and so to misery. Nothing protects us so surely from this wrong turning as inner wealth, the wealth of the mind, for the more eminent it becomes, the less room does it leave for boredom. The inexhaustible activity of ideas, their constantly renewed play with the manifold phenomena of the inner and outer worlds, the power and urge always to make different combinations of them, all these put the eminent mind, apart from moments of relaxation, quite beyond the reach of boredom.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 329–330
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

People, World, Idea, Wealth

“The Mussolini of 1944 reasserted the socialist beliefs of his youth because he now felt that he had been cheated by the world of finance and industry: after having gained immensely from fascism,… To maintain some intellectual coherence he tried to pretend that, notwithstanding appearances, he had never deserted the socialist programme he had put forward for fascism in 1919; he had allowed certain tactical deviations in the interim, but for the most part, his basic views had never changed. In anonymous articles he now confirmed that he had been right when, in 1910, he called on the proletariat to capture power from the capitalists by a bloody revolution... He now decreed that all industrial firms employing more than 100 workers would be nationalized.”

Denis Mack Smith (1920–2017) British historian

Source: Mussolini, 1983, p. 311-312

Youth, World, Appearance, Change

“Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance.”

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) English politician and Earl

Vol. 1, p. 8; "A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm".
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)

Truth, World

“The content of his theology was that there was a supreme being who had tried to make us perfect, but presumably had failed; that if one was a Good Man he would go to a place called Heaven…. Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one's business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse; and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good — kept him in touch with higher things.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

~ Ch. 16
Babbitt (1922)

Religion, Business, Time, Perfection

“The reason for the phenomenon we call organization is as fundamental as human life itself. It has its roots in the fact that man, in every fibre of his being, with the full force of every motive he has brought with him through the ages, is stamped indelibly as a social creature.
Our primitive ancestors, before history began to be written, felt both the urge and the necessity to band together. By day, this awkward creature, with his new-found weapons in his clumsy hands, could stand alone and hold his enemy at bay by the power of his growing cunning. But when night fell, his helplessness weighed upon him and he fled in terror to the retreats where others of his kind were congregated, and sought with them a mutual solace of the fears that beset them all”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 1; Lead paragraphs

Life, Age, Fear, History

“Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

Source: Introduction to General Systems Thinking, 1975, p. 12; Cited in: Nawaz Sharif, Pakorn Adulbhan (1978) Systems models for decision making. p. 38

Men, World

“Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness!
Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all
The wanton horrors of her bloody play;
Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless,
Shunning the light, and owning not its name,
Compelled by its deformity to screen
With flimsy veil of justice and of right
Its unattractive lineaments that scare
All save the brood of ignorance; at once
The cause and the effect of tyranny;
Unblushing, hardened, sensual and vile;
Dead to all love but of its abjectness;
With heart impassive by more noble powers
Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame;
Despising its own miserable being,
Which still it longs, yet fears, to disenthrall.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto V
Queen Mab (1813)

Love, Pleasure, Fear, Religion

Quotes about power page 68

Quotes about power
page 68