Quotes about power
page 75

“…the inexorable duty which has come upon you to use your political power to help our Island out of the rotten state which it has now fallen. When I think of the way in which we poured out blood and money to take Contalmaison or to hold Ypres, I cannot understand why it is we should now throw away our conquests and our inheritance with both hands, through sheer helplessness and pusillanimity. In this disastrous year we have written ourselves down as a second Naval Power, squandered our authority in Egypt, and brought India to a position when the miserable public take it as an open question whether we should not clear out of the country altogether. Currently with all this, we have so reduced our reputation abroad and among our own dominions, that as you said the other night, 'they all think we are down and out.”

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

My interest in politics is to see this position retrieved.
Letter to Lord Beaverbook (23 September 1930), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (Michigan: Hillsdale Press, 2012), p. 185
The 1930s

Money, Way, Understanding, Question

“We contend that it was the origin of the capitalist and moneyed interest government, destined finally to swallow up all other powers in the State, and to bring about the most selfish, exacting, and unfeeling class despotism.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857), p. 157

Money, Selfishness

“Every Federal program which has contributed to the development of the West—irrigation, power, reclamation—bears his mark, and the great Federal highway program which binds this country, together, which permits this State to be competitive east and west, north and south, this in large measure is his creation.”

Carl Hayden (1877–1972) American federal politician

John F. Kennedy Kennedy, John F. (November 17, 1961). Remarks in Phoenix at the 50th Anniversary Dinner Honoring Senator Hayden. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=8451 The American Presidency Project. John Woolley and Gerhard Peters. About

Country

“If you conclude, as I do, that the only hope of a permanent peace and happiness for humanity on this planet is an increased expression of love, and that women are the primary carriers of this great force, one of the problems we face is to provide women with more opportunity for using their love powers. The last six thousand years have demonstrated quite conclusively, I believe, that woman under the domination of man can increase but meagerly the world's total love supply. Our obvious goal, than must be to devise social mechanisms whereby man is brought under the love domination of woman.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

Women: Servants for Civilization (1941), p. 44, as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joseph J. Darowski, p. 9; in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda", by Michelle R. Finn.

Love, Women, Happiness, World

“It is important to make a further distinction here among black hatred, black racism, and Black Power. Black hatred is the black man's strong aversion to white society. No black man living in white America can escape it…. But the charge of black racism cannot be reconciled with the facts. While it is true that blacks do hate whites, black hatred is not racism. Racism, according to Webster, is 'the assumption that psychocultural traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another, which is usually coupled with a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its rights to dominance over others.' Where are the examples among blacks in which they sought to assert their right to dominance over others because of a belief in black superiority?… Black Power is an affirmation of the humanity of blacks in spite of white racism. It says that only blacks really know the extent of white oppression, and thus only blacks are prepared to risk all to be free.”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: Black Theology and Black Power (1969), p. 14-16

Hate, Decision, Strong

“O, if we could tear aside the vail, and see for but one hour what it signifies to be a soul in the power of an endless life, what a revelation would it be!”

Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 212.

Life, Soul, Tear

“It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.”

Christopher Marlowe book Hero and Leander

First Sestiad
Hero and Leander (published 1598)

Love, Hate, Fate

“What he reveals is an issue of the utmost importance: how essential it is for the Christian to recognize a plural, numinous universe, made up of angels, saints, the dead and demons - which are not the same as God…that if this created numinous plurality ceases to be understood as a reality, the very concept of God will be disfigured and distorted.. to deny all such powers and figures is just as false, just as ominous as to succomb to them.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

another article by Karl Rahner in Geist und Leben
Broken Lights Letters 1951-59

God, Angels, Reality, Universe

“We all must march to the same drum as Christ. The Church is reformed when the baptized march more resolutely toward holiness, allowing themselves to be recreated in the likeness of God by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Robert Sarah (1945) Roman Catholic bishop

God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith (2015)

God, Christ

“The motives for conceiving modern systems engineering are to be found, at least in part, in past disasters. Arthur D. Hall III [1989] cites: the chemical plant leakage in Bhopal (1986); the explosion of the NASA Challenger space shuttle (1986) and the Apollo fire (1967); the sinking of the Titanic (1912); the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl (1986) and the disaster at Three Mile Island power plant (1979). He cites, too, the capture of markets by Japan from the U. S., the decline in US productivity and the failure of the US secondary school system. He identifies the millions of people dying of starvation every year while other nations stockpile surplus food, medical disasters such as heart disease, while governments subsidize grains used to produce high cholesterol meat, milk and eggs; and many more. One implication is clear: systems engineering faces challenges well beyond the sphere of engineering.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Source: Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering and Management (2003), p. 75-76

People, Disease, School, Food

“My Great-grandfather was a Congregational Minister and my Mother was a Bible scholar, and I was brought up on the Bible, that the story of the Bible was conflict between the kings who had power, and the prophets who preached righteousness. And I was taught to believe in the prophets, got me into a lot of trouble. And my Dad said to me when I was young, "Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone, Dare to have a purpose firm, Dare to let it (be) known."”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Interviewed by Kevin Zeese in 'Counterpunch', December 19, 2005.
2000s

“Capitalist power … is like one of those horrific modern bullets which do not simply pierce the flesh of the victim but explode inside her into a thousand different fragments. … The concept of fetishism is concerned with the explosion of power inside us, not as something that is distinct from the separation of doing and done (as in the concepts of 'ideology' and 'hegemony'), but as something that is integral to that separation. That separation does not just divide capitalists from workers, but explodes inside us, shaping every aspect of what we do and what we think, transforming every breath of our lives into a moment of class struggle.”

John Holloway book Change the World Without Taking Power

Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)

Thinking

“No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: "No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into."”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

As quoted in "Notable & Quotable: The Victims of Socialism" https://web.archive.org/web/20160217064704/http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-the-victims-of-socialism-1455667462 (17 February 2016), The Wall Street Journal, A13 2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

History, Problem, Suicide, Dead

“Poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

"Felix Randal", lines 11-14
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

“The second period, which commenced in the middle of the seventeenth century, and lasted for about a century, was characterized by the application of the powerful analytical methods provided by the new Analysis to the determination of analytical expressions for the number π in the form of convergent series, products, and continued fractions. The older geometrical forms of investigation gave way to analytical processes in which the functional relationship as applied to the trigonometrical functions became prominent. The new methods of systematic representation gave rise to a race of calculators of π, who, in their consciousness of the vastly enhance means of calculation placed in their hands by the new Analysis, proceeded to apply the formulae to obtain numerical approximations to π to ever larger numbers of places of decimals, although their efforts were quite useless for the purpose of throwing light upon the true nature of that number. At the end of this period no knowledge had been obtained as regards the number π of the kind likely to throw light upon the possibility or impossibility of the old historical problem of the ideal construction; it was not even definitely known whether the number is rational or irrational. However, one great discovery, destined to furnish the clue to the solution of the problem, was made at this time; that of the relation between the two numbers π and e, as a particular case of those exponential expressions for the trigonometrical functions which form one of the most fundamentally important of the analytical weapons forged during this period.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), pp. 11-12

Way, Nature, Knowledge, Problem

“Now therefore while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.”

Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress

To His Coy Mistress (1650-1652)

Youth, Soul, Bird, Sport

“I can very well say without hesitation that all those who have political power, even if they use it well have acquired it by demonic mediation and even if they are not conscious of it, they are worshippers of diabolos.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Si tu es le Fils de Dieu (1991), p. 76

“It is not unfair to conclude that some of the pro-BMAC authors have committed serious breaches of academic deontology. For me personally, seeing this shameless overruling of historical evidence with a high-handed use of academic and media power, was the immediate reason to involve myself in this controversial question.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple (2002)

Question, Personality

“The widespread assumption that big business and big government are fundamentally at odds, and that big business supports a free market, serves to maintain the ruling partnership in power; indeed, ‘vulgar liberalism’ and ‘vulgar libertarianism’ (in Carson’s sense) represent the dominant ideologies of the establishment left and establishment right, respectively. The establishment left disguises its government intervention on behalf of the rich as government intervention on behalf of the poor, while the right disguises its government intervention on behalf of the rich as an opposition to government intervention per se – and each side has an interest in maintaining the myth propagated by its nominal opponent. For those who are repelled by the realities of corporate capitalism are lured into becoming opponents of the free market and foot soldiers for the left wing of the ruling class, while those who are attracted by free-market ideals are lured into becoming defenders of corporate capitalism and foot soldiers for the right wing of the ruling class. Either way, the partnership as a whole has its power reinforced.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

Source: "Left-libertarianism, market anarchism, class conflict and historical theories of distributive justice" (2012), p. 422

Way, Business, Support, Reality

“Corporations now govern society, perhaps more than governments themselves do; yet ironically, it is their very power, much of which they have gained through economic globalization, that makes them vulnerable.”

Joel Bakan (1959) Canadian writer, musician, filmmaker and legal scholar

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 1, The Corporation's Rise To Dominance, p. 25

“When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Age, Thinking, Time, Reading

“It is a principle universally agreed upon, that all powers not given are retained.”

George Nicholas (1754–1799) American lawyer

Speech given at the Virginia Ratifying Convention (6-10-1788); per Elliot, Jonathan; The Debates, Resolutions, and Other Proceedings, in Convention, Vol 2; Page 196

Universe

“One problem with our democracy is that a rigid class and caste hierarchy coupled with gross gender inequality has kept large sections of our population traditionally without a voice. But having no voice does not mean having no brain! On the contrary the voiceless have much to say and we can learn so much from their ways of seeing and thinking. Feelings of humanity seem to survive much better amongst the powerless than among the affluent and powerful.”

Anand Patwardhan (1950) Indian film director

Filmmaker as activist - The Hindu http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mag/2004/05/16/stories/2004051600410500.htm (May 16, 2004)

Way, Feeling, Democracy, Problem

“Anyone who dares that nation gets a befitting reply. People across the world learn from Israel the art of doing agricultural and vegetable farming. On the contrary, India has 5,000 km land, population in crores, powerful leaders but Israel has marched way ahead of us.”

Mohan Bhagwat (1950) Indian activist

On Israel, as quoted in " Justifying 'Hindu Rashtra' Mohan Bhagwat quotes Tagore http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-mohan-bhagwat-cites-tagore-appeals-for-hindu-rashtra-2053725", DNA India (18 January 2015) 2015-present

People, World, Art, Way

“Plainly, the most powerful exception to the notion of a voluntary excahnge in a market economy is the labor market. The existence of a market for labor is one of the distinguishing features of a market economy: workers compete to sell their labor at the most favorable price—meaning, in practice, the highest possible wage. At the same time, however, it is clear that the market for labor is qualitatively different from the market for goods, because workers need to sell their labor to survive.”

Mimi Abramovitz (1941) non-fiction writer

Joel Blau and Mimi Abramovitz, The Dynamics of Social Welfare Policy (Oxford University Press: 2010) p. 68

Time

“Eichmann boasted about anything that seemed at all plausible to him: his genuinely close ties to the highest powers in Hungary; his somewhat indirect contact with the powers of the Third Reich; his access to everything from a "personal aircraft" to direct control of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. … He threatened his victims with the prospect that after the "final victory," Hitler would make him "World Commissar of the Jews."”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Eichmann Before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth (2015).

World, Victory, Personality

“Lord Jesus Christ, our foolish minds are weak; they are more than willing to be drawn—and there is so much that wants to draw us to itself. There is pleasure with its seductive power, the multiplicity with its bewildering distractions, the moment with its infatuating importance and the conceited laboriousness of busyness and the careless time-wasting of light-mindedness and the gloomy brooding of heavy-mindedness—all this will draw us away from ourselves to itself in order to deceive us. But you, who are truth, only you, our Savior and Redeemer, can truly draw a person to yourself, which you have promised to do—that you will draw all to yourself. Then may God grant that by repenting we may come to ourselves, so that you, according to your Word, can draw us to yourself—from on high, but through lowliness and abasement.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1850s, Practice in Christianity (September 1850), p. 157

God, Pleasure, Truth, Light

“Adult franchise is the most powerful instrument devised by man for breaking down social and economic injustice and destroying barriers of caste, creed and religion. It has given the right to the people to choose a government through the democratic process of elections.”

R. Venkataraman (1910–2009) seventh Vice-President of India and the 8th President of India

Source: Commissions and Omissions by Indian Presidents and Their Conflicts with the Prime Ministers Under the Constitution: 1977-2001, p. 183.

People, Religion

“Our political organization, based as it is on an eighteenth-century separation of powers and on a nineteenth-century nationalist state, is generally recognized to be semiobselete.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 4, Historical Analysis, p. 123

“We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) edited by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 225
1880s

Love

“Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible. This competition is the major selective force in the memosphere, and, just as in the biosphere, the challenge has been met with great ingenuity. For instance, whatever virtues (from our perspective) the following memes have, they have in common the property of having phenotypic expressions that tend to make their own replication more likely by disabling or preempting the environmental forces that would tend to extinguish them: the meme for faith, which discourages the exercise of the sort of critical judgment that might decide that the idea of faith was, all things considered a dangerous idea; the meme for tolerance or free speech; the meme of including in a chain letter a warning about the terrible fates of those who have broken the chain in the past; the conspiracy theory meme, which has a built-in response to the objection that there is no good evidence of a conspiracy: "Of course not — that's how powerful the conspiracy is!" Some of these memes are "good" perhaps and others "bad"; what they have in common is a phenotypic effect that systematically tends to disable the selective forces arrayed against them. Other things being equal, population memetics predicts that conspiracy theory memes will persist quite independently of their truth, and the meme for faith is apt to secure its own survival, and that of the religious memes that ride piggyback on it, in even the most rationalistic environments. Indeed, the meme for faith exhibits frequency-dependent fitness: it flourishes best when it is outnumbered by rationalistic memes; in an environment with few skeptics, the meme for faith tends to fade from disuse.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained (1991)

Fate, Truth, Faith, Exercises

“The state gives orders and coerces, religion teaches and persuades. The state prescribes laws, religion commandments. The state has physical power and uses it when necessary; the power of religion is love and benificence. The one abandons the disobedient and expels him; the other receives him in its bosom and seeks to instruct, or at least to console him.”

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) German Jewish philosopher and theologian

Source: Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783), p. 45

Love, Religion, Law

“Free Trade is a great pacificator. We have had many quarrels, many causes of quarrels, during the last fifty years, but we have not had a single war with any first-class Power. Free Trade is slowly but surely cleaving a path through the dense and dark thicket of armaments to the sunny land of brotherhood amongst nations.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Manchester (21 April 1908), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 43.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

War

“As on a lake limpid like a mirror blooms a beautiful lotus and spreads it's fragrance around, so does this Lotus of the East rise in the midst of our people. This news is undoubtedly of great joy to us. Who can tell of what use it will be, where the fragrance of the Lotus will reach, if we do what is in our power to do! Man cannot live without companionship and no companionship can flourish without language.”

Bruno de Souza

Editorial in Udetenchem Sallok, a Konkani weekly in 1889. Translated from its original text in Konkani and quoted by Manohar Rai Sardessai in History of Konkani Literature: From 1500 to 1992, p. 102.

People, Beauty, Joy

“The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Men

“We cannot possibly capture reality based on our limited perceptions and insignificant power. Therefore, we want to use our intelligence to sustain the mind properly, in order to prevent it from being dragged under by the senses. We want to use our intelligence to open ourselves up to receiving divine intervention. We want to use our intelligence to truly understand how to become a genuine lover of the Lord.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

?
Books, Reflections on Sacred Teachings, Volume IV: Sri Isopanisad (Hari-Nama Press, )

Intelligence, Lovers, Understanding, Reality

“The idea of evil as it appears in modern secular thought is an inheritance from Christianity. To be sure, rationalists have repudiated the idea; but it is not long before they find they cannot do without it. What has been understood as evil in the past, they insist, is error – a product of ignorance that human beings can overcome. Here they are repeating a Zoroastrian theme, which was absorbed into later versions of monotheism: the belief that ‘as the “lord of creation” man is at the forefront of the contest between the powers of Truth and Untruth.’ But how to account for the fact that humankind is deaf to the voice of reason? At this point rationalists invoke sinister interests – wicked priests, profiteers from superstition, malignant enemies of enlightenment, secular incarnations of the forces of evil. As so often is the case, secular thinking follows a pattern dictated by religion while suppressing religion’s most valuable insights. Modern rationalists reject the idea of evil while being obsessed by it. Seeing themselves as embattled warriors in a struggle against darkness, it has not occurred to them to ask why humankind is so fond of the dark. They are left with the same problem of evil that faces religion. The difference is that religious believers know they face an insoluble difficulty, while secular believers do not. Aware of the evil in themselves, traditional believers know it cannot be expelled from the world by human action. Lacking this saving insight, secular believers dream of creating a higher species. They have not noticed the fatal flaw in their schemes: any such species will be created by actually existing human beings.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: The Faith of Puppets (p. 18-9)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Truth, World, Religion, Dreams

“You have power, rank, command, influence; we have wealth, the source both of our strength and weakness; the value of these toys, ten times multiplied, would not influence half so much as your slightest wish.”

Walter Scott book Ivanhoe

Source: Ivanhoe (1819), Ch. 44, Rebecca speaking to Rowena.

Time, Wealth

“I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticise their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in a crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Letter to Arthur Brisbane (April 25, 1917); reported in Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters (1946), vol. 6, p. 36
1910s

People, Exercises, Imagination, Intelligence

“Clearly, there are limits on the Executive power. There are limits on the Commander-in-Chief power. Youngstown Sheet and Tube tells us that. That was a case where the President issued an Executive Order to seize steel mills, cited exigent circumstances related to the Korean War. The Supreme Court stepped forward and said no, you can't do that. That is a clear example of courts doing, I think, what the Senator described. How does a court go about that? I think that certainly as a court of appeals judge, you start with the Constitution itself. You go to Supreme Court precedent, which is obviously binding on any court of appeals. You look to the prior precedents of one's own circuit, which would be binding as well. The decisionmaking can also be informed by precedents from other circuits. I think you look at those things, and you try to reach a lawful result, which is precisely that and which is not a result which is driven by passion or considerations of the moment. That is why judges have life tenure.”

Raymond Kethledge (1966) a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Confirmation of Raymond Kethledge https://www.congress.gov/110/chrg/shrg48894/CHRG-110shrg48894.htm (May 7, 2008)

Life, War, Law, Thinking

“If humankind were to follow my advice and if it were in my power, I wouldn't allow the word 'war' to be uttered in any language, I would ban all weapons, even in the form of toys.”

Ratko Mladić (1943) Commander of the Bosnian Serb military

From interview with Robert Block, 1995
Interviews (1993 – 1995)

War

“Years ago, I had an experience with a playground bully. (…) This bully was after me and he was gonna do this, he was gonna do that, all the other kids were terrified of this bully. And he came to me one night, just before immediately the school was over, and he said to me "Icke, I'm beating you up tonight, you're gonna meet me here." And he expected me to run. And I said "alright", and I took him on. I never threw a punch! He was trying to hit me and trying to hit me, and I was just, you know, a bit like Neo in The Matrix, only at normal speed. Cause he was all front! He was all front! His power in that playground perception of his power. Look him in the eye, "come on then, let's have ya", gone. Finished! Over! And that night, his power of that playground disappeared, cause people realized he was a fraud as the word got out.”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

Source: Icke's 2016 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkcqBQyCVD8 on the Richie Allen Show (starts at 01:39:49)

People, School, Fraud, Speed

“I sing of warfare and a man at war.
From the sea-coast of Troy in early days
He came to Italy by destiny,
To our Lavinian western shore,
A fugitive, this captain, buffeted
Cruelly on land as on the sea
By blows from powers of the air—behind them
Baleful Juno in her sleepless rage.
And cruel losses were his lot in war,
Till he could found a city and bring home
His gods to Latium, land of the Latin race,
The Alban lords, and the high walls of Rome.
Tell me the causes now, O Muse, how galled
In her divine pride, and how sore at heart
From her old wound, the queen of gods compelled him—
A man apart, devoted to his mission—
To undergo so many perilous days
And enter on so many trials. Can anger
Black as this prey on the minds of heaven?”

Robert Fitzgerald (1910–1985) American poet, critic and translator

opening lines
The Aeneid (1983)

God, War, Home, Rage

“I’m talking of the revolutionary quality of digitization. And I say it’s revolutionary because once information is no longer a bunch of box files or papers in a filing cabinet but just bits that fly through the air, it means that it’s so hard for people in power to control it. And it’s always been true that knowledge is power. And so once it becomes very difficult for people in power to keep hold of information it means that it becomes very hard for them to keep hold of power, because power just flows out. The default now is zero cost for information to spread instantly around the globe. And in fact you have to pay money to stop it now. That’s incredibly disruptive and revolutionary.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

International Journalism Festival http://www.journalismfestival.com/news/heather-brooke-antitrust-legislation-needed-to-keep-the-internet-free/ Interview with Fabio Chiusi, 12 April 2012. Attributed, In the Media

Money, People, Knowledge, Flying

“In spite of the potential risk of misinformation and disinformation, anonymous social apps can be powerful tools for citizen journalists, whistleblowers, political activists, crime tippers, and other cybercitizens whose online privacy is a matter of the utmost importance.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

“The idea of not having a Deity that he could not comprehend had long been one of Roswell Gardiner's favourite rules of faith. He did not understand by this pretending dogma, that he was, in any respect, of capacity equal to comprehend with that of the Divine Being, but simply that he was not to be expected or required to believe in any theory which manifestly conflicted with his knowledge and experience, as both were controlled by the powers of induction he had derived directly from his Creator. In a word, his exception was one of the most obvious of the suggestions of the pride of reason, and just so much in direct opposition to the great law of regeneration, which has its very gist in the converse of this feeling --Faith.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

The Sea Lions or The Lost Sealers (1849)

Faith, Law, Feeling, Idea

“Pig power in America was infuriating, but pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable.”

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) American activist

Soul on Fire (1978)
1970s

“It is definitely complicated, difficult and risky to fight against the strong-built structures of power concentration. However, it is a must-fight battle for us regardless of the way we die. As a person with dignity, we cannot live under the brutality, cruelty and inhumanity of the thief-like people, who are above the law and proudly walk in our own country.”

Khem Veasna (1971) Cambodian politician

Quoted on his facebook profile (21 April 2015)

People, Law, Way, Strong

“To the Congress of the United States. The present state of the Union, upon which it is customary for the President to report to the Congress under the provisions of the Constitution, is such that it may be regarded with encouragement and satisfaction by every American. Our country is almost unique in its ability to discharge fully and promptly all its obligations at home and abroad, and provide for all its inhabitants an increase in material resources, in intellectual vigor and in moral power. The Nation holds a position unsurpassed in all former human experience. This does not mean that we do not have any problems. It is elementary that the increasing breadth of our experience necessarily increases the problems of our national life. But it does mean that if all will but apply ourselves industriously and honestly, we have ample powers with which to meet our problems and provide for I heir speedy solution. I do not profess that we can secure an era of perfection in human existence, but we can provide an era of peace and prosperity, attended with freedom and justice and made more and more satisfying by the ministrations of the charities and humanities of life.”

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

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Life, Peace, Justice, Home

“I don't know that Trump favors protective tariffs, import quotas or export subsidies. I do know that we don't have free trade. What goes for 'free trade' is trade managed by powerful bureaucracies—national and transnational international—central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health, and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds do as they please. My understanding is that Trump simply wants to make these agreements and organs work for the American people.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Trump and Trade," http://www.wnd.com/2016/03/trump-and-trade/ WorldNetDaily.com, March 11, 2016. 2010s, 2016

People, Health, World, Law

“Indeed, we can find no more instructive lesson on the whole question of suffrage than the history of its development in the British empire. For more than four centuries, royal prerogative and the rights of the people of England have waged perpetual warfare. Often the result has appeared doubtful, often the people have been driven to the wall, but they have always renewed the struggle with unfaltering courage. Often have they lost the battle, but they have always won the campaign. Amidst all their reverses, each generation has found them stronger, each half-century has brought them its year of jubilee, and has added strength to the bulwark of law and breadth to the basis of liberty. This contest has illustrated again and again the saying that 'eternal vigilance is the price of liberty'. The growth of a city, the decay of a borough, the establishment of a new manufacture, the enlargement of commerce, the recognition of a new power, have, each in its turn, added new and peculiar elements to the contest. Hallam says: 'It would be difficult, probably, to name any town of the least consideration in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which did not, at some time or other, return members to Parliament. This is so much the case, that if, in running our eyes along the map, we find any seaport, as Sunderland or Falmouth, or any inland town, as Leeds or Birmingham, which has never enjoyed the elective franchise, we may conclude at once that it has emerged from obscurity since the reign of Henry VIII.'”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

Constitutional History of England, Chap. XIII
1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

People, Law, History, Courage

“Any thing that proves that it is not in the power of Kings and Princes by their great armies to have every thing their own way is of such good example that without any good will to the French one can not help being delighted by it, and you know I have a natural partiality to what some people call rebels.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Letter to Mrs. Armitstead (7 October 1792), quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 125.
1790s

People, Way, Nature, Help

“I am not religious. I cannot conceive of gods who would give a damn about humanity’s frothy carryings-on. I mean, logically, beings of that order just wouldn’t. But maybe there is a force for greater good, created by our unconscious minds conjoined, that becomes an independent power greater than the sum of its parts. Maybe, being a mindthing, it is not time-bound. Maybe it can see everywhere and everywhen and move pawns so that what seems to be today’s victory becomes the cornerstone of tomorrow’s defeat.
Maybe weariness did things to my mind.”

Glen Cook The Black Company

Source: The Black Company (1984), Chapter 6, “Lady” (p. 208)

God, Time, Victory, Parting

“Chess is a form of intellectual productiveness, therein lies, its peculiar charm. Intellectual productiveness is one of the greatest joys -if not the greatest one- of human existence. It is not everyone who can write a play, or build a bridge, or even make a good joke. But in chess everyone can, everyone must, be intellectually productive and so can share in this select delight. I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess, just as I would pity for the man who has no knowledge of love. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy.”

Siegbert Tarrasch book The Game of Chess

The Game of Chess (As quoted by Fred Reinfeld in Tarrasch's Best Games of Chess)

Love, Men, Happiness, Music

“Libertarians are often baffled at how those who appear so sensitive to constraints on choice, and to differences in bargaining power, when these derive from market factors, become so amazingly oblivious to the constraint on choice, and differential bargaining power, represented by the armed might of the state, empowered to enforce its demands by legalized violence.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

"Equality: the Unknown Ideal" (2001)

Appearance

“Let the famous not denounce fame. Far from being empty and meaningless, it fills those it touches with divine power.”

Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) austrian dramatic and writer

Sappho, act 1, sc. 5 (1818).

“Inside Britain there is a parallel threat from the Marxist collectivist totalitarians too. Small in number, those anti-democratic forces have gained great power through the trades union movement. Just to state that fact is to be accused of 'union-bashing'—often by people who know it to be true. Such people are to be found in the Conservative, Liberal and Labour Parties. Their politics may be different but such people share the morality of Laval and Pétain…they are willing not only to tolerate evil, but to excuse it…and to profit by so doing…Both Jim Prior and Keith Joseph know that George Ward and Grunwick are not perfect, nor was Czechoslovakia perfect in 1938. But if Ward and Grunwick are destroyed by the red fascists, then, as in 1938, we will have to ask, whose turn is it next? Yes, it is like 1938. We can all see the evil, but the doctrine of appeasement is still to be heard.”

Norman Tebbit (1931) English politician

Speech in Chingford on the Grunwick dispute (12 September, 1977).
Tebbit, pp. 194-5.

People, Evil, Perfection

“With each tentative tiptoe and stumble, I had to inwardly assure myself that I was a good comedian and that my life was not pointless. “I am addicted to comfort,” I thought as I tumbled into the wood chips. I have become divorced from nature; I don’t know what the names of the trees and birds are. I don’t know what berries to eat or which stars will guide me home. I don’t know how to sleep outside in a wood or skin a rabbit. We have become like living cutlets, sanitized into cellular ineptitude. They say that supermarkets have three days’ worth of food. That if there was a power cut, in three days the food would spoil. That if cash machines stopped working, if cars couldn’t be filled with fuel, if homes were denied warmth, within three days we’d be roaming the streets like pampered savages, like urban zebras with nowhere to graze. The comfort has become a prison; we’ve allowed them to turn us into waddling pipkins. What is civilization but dependency? Now, I’m not suggesting we need to become supermen; that solution has been averred before and did not end well. Prisoners of comfort, we dread the Apocalypse. What will we do without our pre-packed meals and cozy jails and soporific glowing screens rocking us comatose? The Apocalypse may not arrive in a bright white instant; it may creep into the present like a fog. All about us we may see the shipwrecked harbingers foraging in the midsts of our excess. What have we become that we can tolerate adjacent destitution? That we can amble by ragged despair at every corner? We have allowed them to sever us from God, and until we take our brothers by the hand we will find no peace.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Life, God, Peace, Food

“Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?”

Edwin Markham (1852–1940) American poet

The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1899), The Man With the Hoe (1898)

God, Feeling, Search, Star

“Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Preface, A vii
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Fate, Question, Nature, Knowledge

“There is not a power in Europe, no not even Bonaparte's that is so unlimited [as the British monarchy].”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Letter to Lord Holland (9 January 1804), quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 194.
1800s

“Revolutionary war is an anti-toxin which not only eliminates the enemy's poison but also purges us of our own filth. Every just, revolutionary war is endowed with tremendous power and can transform many things or clear the way for their transformations. The Sino-Japanese war will transform both China and Japan; provided China perseveres in the War of Resistance and in the united front, the old Japan will surely be transformed into a new Japan and the old China into a new China, and people and everything else in both China and Japan will be transformed during and after the war.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Protracted Warfare (1938)

War, People, Way, Perseverance

“In fact, all the additional knowledge gained by an irrationally constituted society may but enlarge and enhance the powers of death and destruction.”

Paul A. Baran (1909–1964) American Marxist economist

Source: The Political Economy Of Growth (1957), Chapter Eight, The Steep Ascent, p. 299

Death, Knowledge

“genuine continence and virginity are rare and costly achievements - admirable and really extraordinary; the real thing, nota bene, not simply a shrivelling of Eros-power by means of life-long taboo injections. The Ancients knew this - they called chastity, honestly, simply and humbly, a gift, a charisma, to be implored from God with tears and in humiliating experience - not just a simple athletic feat of will-power and self-control.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights p. 21 Diaries 1951.

Life, God, Tear

“This is a letter from God, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting, unto God, the Almighty, the Best Beloved, to affirm that the Bayán and such as bear allegiance to it are but a present from me unto Thee and to express my undoubting faith that there is no God but Thee, that the kingdoms of Creation and Revelation are Thine, that no one can attain anything save by Thy power and that He Whom Thou hast raised up is but Thy servant and Thy Testimony.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Second Tablet to ‘Him Who Will Be Made Manifest’

God, Faith, Help

“There must be times, in the world of business, when two Peale-powered personalities find themselves in opposition. Number One is determined to achieve success by selling Number Two a great gross of non-molting dust mops; Number Two is equally determined not to have the mops. Both have affirmed an equal number of times that he can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth him. What happens? Theologians will scratch their heads over this, and Immensity itself may feel a tremor.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

World, Feeling, Business, Time

“The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.)”

Stephen Jay Gould book I Have Landed

"The Good People of Halifax", p. 390 (originally appeared in The Globe and Mail, 2001-09-20)
I Have Landed (2002)

Age, Evil

“The Garden of Eden in which Adam and Eve dwelt was only an illusion. Before men accumulated sexual shame and celebrative guilt they lacked that character differentiation out of which the human soul takes its being. Their world was a garden only in the sense that the jungle is a garden to its animal inhabitants. Man means something different when he speaks of a garden, or an El Dorado, or a paradise for the human spirit. Man means a world of eternal springtime in the human heart, where faith never fails and hope never falters, where men always understand more today than they did yesterday, and establish an always broadening responsibility in the world. He means a world of lasting contentment, where the contentment of today passes that of yesterday, and a world of complete happiness where today's happiness is bigger than that of the day before. He means a world of love which fears nothing that the human eye can see, and a world of power which cannot be touched by rage in the performance of any act. When he sees these things he is not dreaming, and when he reaches for them he is not play acting. He is only sounding the battle horn and raising the banner by which he lays claim to ownership of the world, acting in his own name.”

Paul Rosenfels (1909–1985) American sociologist

page 188
Psychoanalysis and Civilization

Love, Men, Happiness, World

“Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

As quoted in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 155
History as a System (1962)

“In Syria, we witnessed "a successful attempt by the Russians at replacing bully power with a balance of power."”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Putin Saves Us From Ourselves," https://www.wnd.com/2012/03/putin-saves-us-from-ourselves/ WorldNetDaily.com, March 23, 2012. 2010s, 2012

Success

“The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.”

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) novelist

In this work are exhibited in a very high degree the two most engaging powers of an author. New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new. ~ Samuel Johnson, "The Life of Alexander Pope" from Lives of the English Poets (1781) http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/lvpc10.txt Misattributed

“Becoming a leader' has become a mantra. The explosive growth of the 'leadership industry' is based on the belief that leading is a path to power and money, a medium for achievement, and a mechanism for creating change. But there are other, parallel truths: that leaders of every stripe are in disrepute; that the tireless and often superficial teaching of leadership has brought us no closer to nirvana; and that followers nearly everywhere have become, on the one hand, disappointed and disillusioned, and, on the other, entitled and emboldened.”

Barbara Kellerman (1939) American academic

Barbara Kellerman (2012), The End of Leadership, Harper Collins Publishers; Book description

Money, Truth, Disappointment, Change

“A single experience of this awful convulsion of the elements suffices to fasten the memory of its occurrence upon the mind with such a dreadful force that no effort can efface the remembrance of it. The destructive violence of this storm exceeds in its power, fierceness, and grandeur all other phenomena of the atmosphere.”

John Park Finley (1854–1943) American meteorologist

Tornadoes, 1887.

Effort, Memory

“Majorities, as such, afford no guarantees for justice. They are men of the same nature as minorities. They have the same passions for fame, power, and money, as minorities; and are liable and likely to be equally — perhaps more than equally, because more boldly — rapacious, tyrannical and unprincipled, if intrusted with power. There is no more reason, then, why a man should either sustain, or submit to, the rule of the majority, than of a minority.”

Lysander Spooner book No Treason

No Treason (1867–1870), No. I

Men, Money, Justice, Nature

“…another cause of today’s instability is that we now have a society in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking, and the corporation. These are free of political controls and social responsibility and have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production. The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

World

“The rapid establishment of Christianity must therefore have been from the conviction which those who embraced it, had of its "Truth and power unto salvation." Christianity at first spread itself amongst the most enlightened nations of the earth - in those places where human learning was in its greatest perfection; and, by the force of the evidence which attended it, amongst such men it gained an establishment. It has been justly observed, that "it happened very providentially to the honour of the Christian religion, that it did not take its rise in the dark illiterate ages of the world, but at a time when arts and sciences were t their height, and when there were men who made it the business of their lives to search after truth and lift the several opinions of the philosophers and wise men, concerning the duty, the end, and chief happiness of reasonable creatures." Both the learned and the ignorant alike embraced its doctrines; the learned were not likely to be deceived in the proofs which were offered; and the same cause undoubtedly operated to produce the effect upon each. But an immediate conversion of the bulk of mankind, can arise only from some proofs of a ddivine authority offering themselves immediately to the senses; the preaching of any new doctrine, if lest to operate only by its own force, would go but a very little way towards the immediate conversion of the gnorant, who have no principle of action but what arises from habit, and whose powers of reasoning are insufficient to correct their errors. When Mahomet was required by his followers to work a miracle for their conviction, he always declined it; he was too cautious to trust to an experiment, the success of which was scarcely whithin the bounds of probablity; he amused his followers with prtended visions, which with the aid afterwards of the civil and military powr; and as the accomplishment of that event was by a few obscure persons, who founded their pretentions upon authority from heaven, we are next to consider, what kind of proofs of their divine commission they offered to the world; and whether they themselves could have been deceived, or mankind could have been deludded by them.”

Samuel Vince (1749–1821) British mathematician, astronomer and physicist

Source: The Credibility of Christianity Vindicated, p. 20; As quoted in " Book review http://books.google.nl/books?id=52tAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA261," in The British Critic, Volume 12 (1798). F. and C. Rivington. p. 261-262

Men, Happiness, Truth, Age

“The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning, but imagination.”

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

Quoted in Robert Perceval Graves, The Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Vol. 3 (1889), p. 219.

Imagination, Mathematics

“He who inflicts a vile and unjust harm by using the power and the force with which he is invested, does not conquer; the true victory is to have on one's side Right naked and entire.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Quem faz injúria vil e sem razão,
Com forças e poder em que está posto,
Não vence; que a vitória verdadeira
É saber ter justiça nua e inteira.
Stanza 58, lines 5–8 (tr. Joaquim Nabuco)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto X

Victory

“I was learning that, even for a woman with power, the path was dotted with land mines—she's so ambitious. she's so aggressive. she's ruthless. "Funny thing," I used to say, "a man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless... all a woman has to do is put you on hold."”

Marlo Thomas (1937) American actress, producer, and social activist

Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny http://books.google.com/books?id=pbVDuMYsLJQC&q=%22A+man+has+to+be+Joe+McCarthy+to+be+called+ruthless+All+a+woman+has+to+do+is+put+you+on+hold%22&pg=PT218#v=onepage (2010)

Learning

“Yeah. ‘Environment’ was very big for a while. Ecology Now stickers on the windshields of cars belonging to hairy young men—cars which dripped oil wherever they parked and took off in clouds of smoke thicker than your pipe can produce…Before long, the fashionable cause was something else, I forget what. Anyhow, that whole phase—the wave after wave of causes—passed away. People completely stopped caring…
I feel a moral certainty that a large part of the disaster grew from this particular country, the world’s most powerful, the vanguard country for things both good and ill…never really trying to meet the responsibilities of power.
We’ll make halfhearted attempts to stop some enemies in Asia, and because the attempts are halfhearted we’ll piss away human lives—on both sides—and treasure—to no purpose. Hoping to placate the implacable, we’ll estrange our last few friends. Men elected to national office will solemnly identify inflation with rising prices, which is like identifying red spots with the measles virus, and slap on wage and price controls, which is like papering the cracks in a house whose foundations are sliding away. So economic collapse brings international impotence…As for our foolish little attempts to balance what we drain from the environment against what we put back—well, I mentioned that car carrying the ecology sticker.
At first Americans will go on an orgy of guilt. Later they’ll feel inadequate. Finally they’ll turn apathetic. After all, they’ll be able to buy any anodyne, any pseudo-existence they want.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 5 (pp. 53-54)

Men, People, World, Hope

“Iraq hasn't suddenly 'slipped back into' this backward and benighted state. It was bombed there by a mulish military power which didn't know Shiite from Shinola. [translated from German]”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Irak: Von Tuten und Blasen keine Ahnung gehabt" http://jungefreiheit.de/kolumne/2014/irak-von-tuten-und-blasen-keine-ahnung-gehabt/, Junge Freiheit, June 27, 2014. 2010s, 2014

“Six hundred years before the birth of Christ absolutism held unbounded sway. Throughout the East it was propped by the unchanging influence of priests and armies. In the West, where there were no sacred books requiring trained interpreters, the priesthood acquired no preponderance, and when the kings were overthrown their powers passed to aristocracies of birth.”

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

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

Books, Birth, Christ, Training

“No one is evil, they just make very bad decisions. And no one has super powers, they only have their street smarts.”

Olly Blackburn Film director and screenwriter

[Eye for Film, Giving British films some Punch, http://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/feature.php?id=545, Amber, Wilkinson, 18 July 2008, 23 February 2012, www.eyeforfilm.co.uk]

Decision, Evil

“The poem you sent me was as fiery and virile as anything you’ve ever written – or anybody else, for that matter. Especially the second part went to my brain like the flaming liquor of insanity. No one else besides Jack London has the power to move me just that way.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith (c. November 1928)
Letters

Way, Parting

“The idea of obligation is rationally unstable without the accompanying idea of a sufficiently good and powerful obligator to give the command and sustain the order in which the command is observed.”

John E. Hare (1949) British philosopher

Source: “Evolutionary Theory and Theological Ethics” (2012), p. 250

Idea

“For a long time now there has been a rising tide of rebellion against this Western paramountcy, and a desire to reassert Muslim values and restore Muslim greatness. The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat. The first was his loss of domination in the world, to the advancing power of Russia and the West. The second was the undermining of his authority in his own country, through an invasion of foreign ideas and laws and ways of life and sometimes even foreign rulers or settlers, and the enfranchisement of native non-Muslim elements. The third—the last straw—was the challenge to his mastery in his own house, from emancipated women and rebellious children. It was too much to endure, and the outbreak of rage against these alien, infidel, and incomprehensible forces that had subverted his dominance, disrupted his society, and finally violated the sanctuary of his home was inevitable. It was also natural that this rage should be directed primarily against the millennial enemy and should draw its strength from ancient beliefs and loyalties.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

Life, Women, Children, World

“My problem was that I felt ashamed of feeling sad or angry. Now, I don't hide my vulnerability in my lyrics. There's no way I was going to get raped and not get something out of it. I learned about power and hope and forgiveness. I like who I am now and I wouldn't be who I am if that hadn't happened.”

Fiona Apple (1977) singer-songwriter, musician

ELLE, "Fiona Apple is NOT the next Alanis, thank you" October [1996]

Sadness, Hope, Way, Feeling

“It is the nature of all persons to hold on to power when they have it,” Shulivar said. “Thus it stagnates and becomes clouded, poisonous. Radical action is necessary to free it.”

Sarah Monette book The Goblin Emperor

Source: The Goblin Emperor (2014), Chapter 32, "Shulivar, Bralchenar, and Narchanezhen" (pp. 446-447)

Nature, Personality

“In view of all the foregoing reasons, I cannot but think the case conclusive, that neither form of the Doctrine of Authority can be maintained. We should abandon, as consistent thinkers, and still more as consistent Christians, the imperative authority both of Church Tradition and of Scripture. There is nothing left, then, but the Doctrine of Reason — the Method of Conviction as the only real method of determining religious belief and practice, resting on the use of the human rational powers taken in their entire compass.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.260

Thinking

“The most powerful way to prevail in global competition is still invisible to many companies. During the 1980s, top executives were judged on their ability to restructure, declutter, and delayer their corporations. In the 1990s, they'll be judged on their ability to identify, cultivate, and exploit the core competencies that make growth possible - indeed, they'll have to rethink the concept of the corporation itself.”

Gary Hamel (1954) American management expert

Source: "The Core Competence of the Corporation," 1990, p. 2; Lead paragraph

Way

““Globalisation is forcing the convergence of economic policy and limiting the power of the nation-state. An increasingly self-reliant and information-rich electorate has no time and no need for the nanny state.””

Mark Latham (1961) Australian politician

Unsourced

Time

“The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Power of Words (1937), p. 235

Life, Men

“… Marx and Bakunin were engaged in a conflict in which it is hard to distinguish political from personal animosities. Marx did his best to persuade everybody that Bakunin was only using the International for his private ends, and in March 1870 he circulated a confidential letter to this effect. He also saw the hand of Bakunin (whom he never met after 1864) on every occasion when his own policies were opposed in the International. Bakunin, for his part, not only combated Marx’ s political programme but, as he often wrote, regarded Marx as a disloyal, revengeful man, obsessed with power and determined to impose his own despotic authority on the whole revolutionary movement. Marx, he said, had all the merits and defects of the Jewish character; he was highly intelligent and deeply read, but an inveterate doctrinaire and fantastically vain, an intriguer and morbidly envious of all who, like Lassalle, had cut a more important figure than himself in public life.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume I, The Founders, pp. 247-8

Life, Intelligence, Revenge, Reading

“The [Labour] Government's first step will be to call Parliament together at the earliest moment and place before it an Emergency Powers Bill to be passed through in all its stages on the first day. This Bill will be wide enough in its terms to allow all that will be immediately necessary to be done by ministerial orders. These orders must be incapable of challenge in the Courts or in any way except in the House of Commons.”

Stafford Cripps (1889–1952) British politician

Can Socialism come by Constitutional Methods? (1933), p. 4, quoted in Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years. Memoirs 1931-1945 (London: Frederick Muller Ltd, 1957), p. 151.

Way, Housing

“Never, at any price, should we have put our money on France and against the peoples subjected to her yoke. On the contrary, we should have helped them to achieve their liberty and, if necessary, should have goaded them into doing so. There was nothing to stop us in 1940 from making a gesture of this sort in the Near East and in North Africa. In actual fact our diplomats instead set about the task of consolidating French power, not only in Syria, but in Tunis, in Algeria and Morocco as well. Our 'gentlemen' obviously preferred to maintain cordial relations with distinguished Frenchmen, rather than with a lot of hirsute revolutionaries, with a chorus of musical comedy officers, whose one idea was to cheat us, rather than with the Arabs, who would have been loyal partners for us.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

14 February 1945.
Disputed, The Testament of Adolf Hitler (1945)

Money, People, Music, Idea

“The anti‐Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving of a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. To a long‐term enterprise he prefers an explosion of rage analogous to the running amuck of the Malays. His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti‐Semitism channels evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti‐Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people. Above all this naive dualism is eminently reassuring to he anti‐Semite himself. If all he has to do is to remove Evil, that means that the Good is already given. He has no need to seek it in anguish, to invent it, to scrutinize it patiently when he has found it, to prove it in action, to verify it by its consequences, or, finally, to shoulder he responsibilities of the moral choice be has made. It is not by chance that the great outbursts of anti‐Semitic rage conceal a basic optimism. The anti‐Semite as cast his lot for Evil so as not to have to cast his lot for Good. The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil, he less one is tempted to place the Good in question. One does not need to talk about it, yet it is always understood in the discourse of the anti‐Semite and it remains understood in his thought. When he has fulfilled his mission as holy destroyer, the Lost Paradise will reconstitute itself. For the moment so many tasks confront the anti‐Semite that he does not have time to think about it. He is in the breach, fighting, and each of his outbursts of rage is a pretext to avoid the anguished search for the Good.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Anti-Semite and Jew

Pages 31-32
Anti-Semite and Jew (1945)

Men, Hate, People, Search

“Labour freed up enormous amounts of money for third sector initiatives, which was magnificent. But it also became too statist. Charities became very reliant on state funding to pursue their agendas, so charities became distant from local communities. Despite all the funding, there was no transformation of the lives of excluded poor people. The greatest gift of the big society will be the renewal of the Labour Party. If it takes civil society and people power seriously, and listens to people who have a following in their own communities, it will find that it has reconnected with its own political traditions.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Interview with Third Sector, 6 June 2011 http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/interview-lord-glasman/infrastructure/article/1073529

Money, People, Communication, Distant

“Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.
Give us the ballot and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.
Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.
Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill and send to the sacred halls of Congress men who will not sign a "Southern Manifesto" because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice.
Give us the ballot, and we will place judges on the benches of the south who will do justly and love mercy, and we will place at the head of the southern states governors who have felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the Divine.
Give us the ballot, and we will quietly and nonviolently, without rancor or bitterness, implement the Supreme Court's decision of May seventeenth, 1954.”

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

1950s, Give Us the Ballot (1957)

Love, Men, Books, Justice

“That image or rather that Person, so human, yet so entirely Divine, has a power to fill the imagination, to arrest the affections, to deepen and purify the conscience, which nothing else in the world has.”

John Campbell Shairp (1819–1885) British writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 61.

World, Imagination, Personality

“Let me say again that I am not impugning the motives of the men in Wall Street. They may think that that is the best way to create prosperity for the country. When you have got the market in your hand, does honesty oblige you to turn the palm upside down and empty it? If you have got the market in your hand and believe that you understand the interest of the country better than anybody else, is it patriotic to let it go? I can imagine them using this argument to themselves.
The dominating danger in this land is not the existence of great individual combinations, — that is dangerous enough in all conscience, — but the combination of the combinations, — of the railways, the manufacturing enterprises, the great mining projects, the great enterprises for the development of the natural water-powers of the country, threaded together in the personnel of a series of boards of directors into a "community of interest" more formidable than any conceivable single combination that dare appear in the open.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Section VIII: “Monopoly, Or Opportunity?”, p. 186 http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA186&dq=%22Let+me+say+again%22 1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

Men, Way, Imagination, Communication

Quotes about power page 75

Quotes about power
page 75