Quotes about ruler (556 quotes, page 6)

“The people are never voluntary slaves, they yield not to power, but when they believe it to be a duty, or are unable to oppose it. Hence in a state newly founded or reformed, the subjects are not at once enslaved, however imperfect the constitution might be. Despair, that prompted them at first to throw off the yoke, would prompt them to throw it off anew whenever they should feel its weight. To commence with open attacks upon liberty, and to attempt to destroy it by violence, would prove therefore a rash undertaking. When those who govern, daringly dispute the supreme power with open force, and the people perceive their rulers attempting * to enslave them, the latter ever prevail, and the Prince in a moment loses the fruit of all his efforts. At his first attempt the subjects unite against him, and his authority is at stake, if his conduct be not more submissive than imperious. It is not therefore by open attacks Princes first attempt to enslave the people, they take their measures in secrecy, they have recourse to craft: it is by flow but constant efforts, by changes almost imperceptible, by innovations of which it is difficult to observe the consequences, and such as are scarcely taken notice of.”

Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793) politician and journalist during the French Revolution

THE CHAINS OF SLAVERY

Despair , People , Effort , Feeling

“America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Independence Day address (1821)

Peace , Justice , Friendship , Search

“Then the spirits of our fallen comrades shall rise from their graves to thank all those whose courage and loyalty have now once more atoned for the sins committed in an hour of weakness against them and against our Volk. Let our avowal of faith on this day be a solemn oath: the war forced upon the Greater German Reich by the capitalist rulers of France and England must be transformed into the most glorious victory in German history!”

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

Speech in the Berlin Zeughaus http://www.nommeraadio.ee/meedia/pdf/RRS/Adolf%20Hitler%20-%20Collection%20of%20Speeches%20-%201922-1945.pdf (March 10, 1940) p. 699
1940s

Courage , Faith , History , War

“In all matters, the determining question with the Muslims is how it will affect the Muslims vis-a-vis the Hindus. If representative government can help the Muslims, they will demand it, and fight for it. … The dominating consideration with the Muslims is not democracy. The dominating consideration is how democracy with majority rule will affect the Muslims in their struggle against the Hindus. Will it strengthen them, or will it weaken them? If democracy weakens them, they will not have democracy. They will prefer the rotten state to continue in the Muslim States, rather than weaken the Muslim ruler in his hold upon his Hindu subjects.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Democracy , Fight , Help , Question

“Impressed as we are with a deep sense of the excellence of our Constitution, as it exists in theory, we rejoice that we are not, like our brothers in France, reduced to the hard necessity of tearing up inveterate abuse by the roots, even where utility was so intermixed as to admit of separation. Ours is an easier and a less unpleasing task; to remove with a steady and a temperate resolution the abuses which the lapse of many years, inattention and supineness in the great body of the people, and unremitting vigilance in their rulers to invade and plunder them of their rights, have suffered to overgrow and to deform that beautiful system of government so admirably suited to our situation, our habits and our wishes. We have not to innovate but to restore. The just prerogatives of our monarch we respect and will maintain. The constitutional powers of the peers of the realms we wish not to invade. We know that in the exercise of both, abuses have grown up; but we also know that those abuses will be at once corrected, so as never again to recur, by restoring to us the people what we for ourselves demand as our right, our due weight and influence in that estate which is our property, the representation of the people in parliament.”

Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–1798) Irish politician

Address of the Volunteers assembled at Belfast to the people of Ireland (14 July 1792), quoted in T. W. Moody, R. B. McDowell and C. J. Woods (eds.), The Writings of Theobold Wolfe Tone, 1763–98, Volume I: Tone's career in Ireland to June 1795 (1998), p. 218

Beauty , Suffering , People , Sense

“What country in the world today engages in the most extreme anti-Semitic persecution? The Soviet Union. It’s not an accident, because if you have a society with concentrated power, if you have a collectivist society, it’s going to be in a position to exercise the preferences and prejudices of its rulers. Moreover, it’s going to have an incentive to do so, because it’s going to need a scapegoat and it will choose some group like the Jews or the blacks to be the scapegoat.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

“Interview with Milton Friedman”, Playboy magazine (Feb. 1973)

World , Country , Exercises

“To begin with, the new conquerors and rulers…were of a different faith (Islam) from that of their predecessors… their principal achievements lay in a great systematization of agrarian exploitation and an immense concentration of the resources so obtained.”

Irfan Habib (1931) Left Leaning Historian

Quoted from Sandhy, Jain, The denial of history https://web.archive.org/web/20100925004852/http://bharatvani.org/indology/IrfanHabib-denial.html

Faith

“Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet choose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to exalt it by its influence on reason alone; that the impious presumption of legislature and ruler, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time: That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; … that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; and therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust or emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religions opinion, is depriving him injudiciously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow-citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emolumerits, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, … and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”

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

A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, Chapter 82 (1779). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 1 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-01_Bk.pdf, pp. 438–441. Comparison of Jefferson's proposed draft and the bill enacted http://web.archive.org/web/19990128135214/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7842/bill-act.htm
1770s

Confidence , Dependency , Self-confidence , Falseness

“There is a tradition of popular struggle in the United States that has been downplayed and ignored. It ebbs and flows but never ceases. Moved by a combination of anger and hope, ordinary people have organized, agitated, demonstrated, and engaged in electoral challenges, civil disobedience, strikes, sit-ins, takeovers, boycotts, and sometimes violent clashes with the authorities - for better wages and work conditions, a safer environment, racial and gender justice, and peace and nonintervention abroad. Against the heaviest odds, they have suffered many defeats but won some important victories, forcible extracting concessions and imposing reforms upon resistant rulers.”

Michael Parenti (1933) American academic

Source: Democracy for the Few (2010 [1974]), sixth edition, Chapter 17, p. 320

Peace , Anger , Justice , Victory

“I had gotten caught with a shopping bag full of Marijuana, a shopping bag full of love - I was in love with the weed and I did not for one minute think that anything was wrong with getting high. I had been getting high for four or five years and was convinced, with the zeal of a crusader, that marijuana was superior to lush - yet the rulers of the land seemed all to be lushes. I could not see how they were more justified in drinking than I was in blowing the gage. I was a grasshopper, and it was natural that I felt myself to be unjustly prosecuted.”

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) American activist

"On Becoming"
1960s, Soul on Ice (1968)

Drink , Nature , Marijuana , Thinking

“We do know that Hitler spent his birthday wearing a red armband, which all soldiers in Munich were required to wear. We also know that on April 20, during the daily roll call of his unit, he had to announce, as he did every day, the latest decrees and announcements of the Soviet rulers of Munich, which had been conveyed to the regiment through its propaganda department.”

Thomas Weber (historian) (1974) German historian

Source: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017), pp. 50-51

Birthday

“That I address you as a friend is no formality. I own no foes. My business in life has been for the past 33 years to enlist the friendship of the whole of humanity by befriending mankind, irrespective of race, colour or creed. … We have no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland, nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents… But your own writings and pronouncements and those of your friends and admirers leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity, especially in the estimation of men like me who believe in human friendliness. Such are your humiliation of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Poland and the swallowing of Denmark. I am aware that your view of life regards such spoliations as virtuous acts. But we have been taught from childhood to regard them as acts degrading humanity…Hence we cannot possibly wish success to your arms…. But ours is a unique position. We resist British imperialism no less than Nazism… If there is a difference, it is in degree. One-fifth of the human race has been brought under the British heel by means that will not bear scrutiny… Our resistance to it does not mean harm to the British people. We seek to convert them, not to defeat them on the battle-field… No spoliator can compass his end without a certain degree of co-operation, willing or unwilling, of the victim…. The rulers may have our land and bodies but not our souls…. We know what the British heel means for us and the non-European races of the world. But we would never wish to end the British rule with German aid… We have found in non-violence a force which, if organized, can without doubt match itself against a combination of all the most violent forces in the world… If not the British, some other power will certainly improve upon your method and beat you with your own weapon. You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they would feel proud.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Letter to Hitler. 24 December 1940. Quoted from Koenraad Elst: Return of the Swastika (2007). (Also in https://web.archive.org/web/20100310135408/http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/fascism/gandhihitler.html)
1940s

Childhood , Soul , Friendship , Success

“Never before has a ruler been so beloved by his own people, so highly esteemed by the whole world.”

Alfred von Waldersee (1832–1904) Prussian Field Marshal

Waldersee in his diary, 16 March 1888, on the recently deceased Kaiser Wilhelm I

World , People

“We attest that He is the Willer of all things that are, the ruler of all originated phenomena; there does not come into the visible or invisible world anything meager or plenteous, small or great, good or evil, or any advantage or disadvantage, belief or unbelief, knowledge or ignorance, success or failure, increase or decrease, obedience or disobedience, except by His will. What He wills is, and what He does not, will not; there is not a glance of the eye, nor a stray thought of the heart that is not subject to His will. He is the Creator, the Restorer, the Doer of whatsoever He wills. There is none that rescinds His command, none that supplements His decrees, none that dissuades a servant from disobeying Him, except by His help and mercy, and none has power to obey Him except by His will.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

(2005) Ihyaa ‘Ulum al-Deen. Beirut: Dar Ibn Hazm, p. 107.

Success , Help , Heart , Knowledge

“Mystery is in a way the guarantee of the boundlessness of the might of the ruler: power bound to reason must always have limitations, great though it may be.”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Patrick L. McGuire, Her Strong Enchantments Failing (p. 94)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

Way

“Concerning Lu-Enki, the ruler of the province of Zimudar, he should come to you, and should bring with him 60 troops. And as for you, with the soldiers who are under your authority, get the trench dug! So as not to change the attitude of the province, you people are not to release the workers while the land has not yet been secured. Let messengers bring me news about those eastern provinces. This is urgent!”

Shu-Sin Sumerian king

To his general Sharrum-bani, Letter from Shu-Suen to Sharrum-bani about digging a trench http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section3/tr3116.htm, Correspondence of the Kings of Ur, Old Babylonian period, ca. 1800-1600 BCE, at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.

People , Change

“In order that the ruler and the general manager can build everything for you concerning the fortress, carry out this work on the fortress now. The reputation of this fortress shall not be diminished.”

Shulgi

About the fortress Igi-hursaja.
Correspondence of the Kings of Ur, Letter from Shulgi to Puzur-Shulgi about work on the fortress Igi-hursanga http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section3/tr3108.htm

“God only, however, selects a tyrant for a people that deserves to be oppressed. At that time, the Lord of the world establishes over them a tyrant who will avenge those who had been oppressed and brutalized. Such have been some among the temporal rulers. At that time, the Lord of the world places over such a people a tyrant. so that they might avenge those wronged.”

Subh-i-Azal (1831–1912) Persian religious leader

in such a way that the despot does not realize that he is aiding his Lord and avenging the blood of the oppressed upon those who had tormented them. This is apparent today, and in some stations it is being implemented. Know for a certainty that the Lord of the world without any doubt knows the tyrant from the good monarch. Rather, everything he does is for the sake of some wisdom, and he knows more about the final outcome of such matters.
Treatise on Kingship

World , God , Time , People

“Professor Lal was already a veteran whose major book, History of the Khaljis, was compulsory reading for students of medieval Indian history from the undergraduate class onwards. I still find it very useful when I teach any course on the Delhi sultanate. … Historiographically the book fell entirely and conspicuously in the genre of nationalist historiography whose hallmark was its challenge· to the portrayal of medieval Indian history as a story of unrelenting conflict between the medieval Muslim rulers and their Hindu subjects. History of the Khaljis is one of the best works in this genre: empirically sound, objective in its assessment of events and persons, non-judgemental in its evaluation of the motives of rulers or their opponents. The remarkable quality gave the book a long life in the discipline, even when newer problematiques of socio-economic history began to displace the ones of dynastic history that had remained the preoccupation of the earlier generation.”

K. S. Lal (1920–2002) Indian historian

Harbans Mukhia, Obituary, The Indian Historical Review http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/037698360102800245

Reading , History , Personality , Books

“Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa are the Indian equivalents of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. The story of Rama, the ideal son and ruler, Sita, the ideal wife, Bharata and Lakshmana, the ideal brothers and Hanuman, the ideal devotee, has been so beautifully stated in the epic poem of Ramayana that even in the remotest village of India, even the most illiterate man, woman or child is familiar with the characters and situations in the story. The credit for this goes to the poetic and dramatic genius of Valmiki.”

Vālmīki Legendary Indian poet, author of the Ramayana

Sri Aurobindo
Valmiki

“Khamenei is not the first ruler of Iran with whom poets have run into trouble. For some 12 centuries poetry has been the Iranian people’s principal medium of expression. Iran may be the only country where not a single home is found without at least one book of poems. Initially, Persian poets had a hard time to define their place in society. The newly converted Islamic rulers suspected the poets of trying to revive the Zoroastrian faith to undermine the new religion. Clerics saw poets as people who wished to keep the Persian language alive and thus sabotage the ascent of Arabic as the new lingua franca.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Without the early Persian poets, Iranians might have ended up like so many other nations in the Middle East who lost their native languages and became Arabic speakers. Early on, Persian poets developed a strategy to check the ardor of the rulers and the mullahs. They started every qasida with praise to God and Prophet followed by panegyric for the ruler of the day. Once those “obligations” were out of the way they would move on to the real themes of the poems they wished to compose. Everyone knew that there was some trick involved but everyone accepted the result because it was good. Despite that modus vivendi some poets did end up in prison or in exile while many others spent their lives in hardship if not poverty. However, poets were never put to the sword. The Khomeinist regime is the first in Iran’s history to have executed so many poets. Implicitly or explicitly, some rulers made it clear what the poet couldn’t write. But none ever dreamt of telling the poet what he should write. Khamenei is the first to try to dictate to poets, accusing them of “crime” and” betrayal” if they ignored his injunctions.
When the Ayatollah Dictates Poetry http://www.aawsat.net/2015/07/article55344336/when-the-ayatollah-dictates-poetry, Ashraq Al-Awsat (Jul 11, 2015).

Home , Faith , Religion , Time

“We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into responding to each new problem by demanding that the government should act. That we should be constantly demanding that an institution we rather despise should solve large problems argues a notable lack of logic in the demos.”

Kenneth Minogue (1930–2013) Australian political theorist

The statesmen of times past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to help 'ordinary people' solve daily problems in their lives. This strange aspiration is a very large change in public life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded with derision to politicians seeking power in order to solve our problems. Today, the demos votes for them.
Introduction, p. 3
The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life

Problem , Thinking

“Very few rulers could come anywhere near Swati Tirunal in his patronage of arts, his catholicity of religous outlook, his transcendence of narrow regional, religious and caste barriers. He was truly a evolved royal sage.”

Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma (1813–1846) Maharajah of Travencore

V. K. Subramanian (2013), in "101 Mystics of India", p, 181
About Swathi Thirunal

Art

“I have had such close opportunities of watching and for whom I entertain so sincere a regard as the young Maharaja of Mysore. Indeed, I think I may add that I should not have come all the way from Simla at this season of the year had I not felt the keenest personal interest both in this State and in its future Ruler. About the latter I shall have a word to say presently. But first let me explain how it is that the fortunes of the Mysore State occupy such a place in the concern and regard of the Government of India…. The young Maharaja whom I am about to instal has recently attained his eighteenth birthday. He has passed through a minority of nearly eight years. They have not been idle or vapid years spent in enjoyment or dissipated in idleness. They have been years of careful preparation for the duties that lie before him and of laborious training for his exalted state. It is no light thing to assume the charge of 5,000,000 of people and it is no perfunctory training that is required for such a task.”

Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV (1884–1940) King of Mysore

Viceroy Lord Curzon in his investiture speech installing him as the Maharaja of Mysore stated in a Durbar held on 8 August 1902. Modern_Mysore, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Open University, 26 November 2013, archive.org, 187 http://archive.org/stream/modernmysore035292mbp/modernmysore035292mbp_djvu.txt,
From Modern Mysore

Light , Personality , Future , People

“He (Veediya Bandara), went and stopped at the Seven Korale. By this time, the ruler there was a war hero. He was Edirimanne Suriya, better known as Edirille Rala. He had made Mudukondapala, a place close to Kurunegala, his capital city. When he saw Commander Veediya Bandara, he was delighted and welcomed him with all love and respect. He was well treated. Then both of them broke into conversation. This leader Edirille Rala, just like Veediya Bandara, was an erstwhile enemy of the Portuguese. As such, this meeting of theirs was extra special. Both of them were enemies of the King of Sitawaka as well. This common feature was something to be happy about. The main aim of Veediya Bandara too, was chasing away the Portuguese from Sri Lanka.”

Dominicus Corea (1565–1596) King of Kotte and Sitawaka

The Mahavama, the recorded chronicles of Sri Lankan history recalls the meeting between Commander Veediya Bandara of the Kandyan kingdom and King Dominicus Corea (Edirille Rala). http://sundaytimes.lk/110320/FunDay/fut_01.html

War , Love , Time , Making love

“Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear *fucking* weapons.”

Ken MacLeod (1954) Scottish science fiction writer

USENET posting to rec.sf.arts.fandom http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.fandom/browse_frm/thread/303b0da0ab25aee/b12adceacd343279 28 September 2000, in the discussion of Robert A. Heinlein's quote "The cowards never started and the weaklings died on the way." (Expanded Universe, How to be a Survivor in the Atomic Age)
Other sources

War , Fear , Children , Past

“I have been deeply shocked by this crime. President McKinley was not a ruler of exclusive or aristocratic tendencies. He was a good friend of the people, a genuine democrat in the best sense of the word. With regard to Mexico, President McKinley had ever evidenced such friendly sentiments that his death will be mourned in this country hardly less keenly than in the United States.”

William McKinley (1843–1901) American politician, 25th president of the United States (in office from 1897 to 1901)

President of Mexico Porfirio Díaz. The Authentic Life of President McKinley, page 398.

Sense , Death , People , Country

“Almost one year has now passed since the horrifying events in Mina, as a result of which several thousand people tragically lost their lives- under the hot sun with thirsty lips- and this happened on the day of Eid while they were in the clothes of ihram. Shortly before that, another group of people were crushed to death in Masjid ul-Haraam while they were worshiping and performing tawaf and salat. Saudi rulers were at fault in both cases. This is what all those present, observers and technical analysts agree upon. Some experts maintain that the events were premeditated. The hesitation and failure to rescue the half-dead and injured people, whose enthusiastic souls and enthralled hearts were accompanying their praying tongues on Eid ul-Adha, is also obvious and incontrovertible. The heartless and murderous Saudis locked up the injured with the dead in containers- instead of providing medical treatment and helping them or at least quenching their thirst. They murdered them.”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

2016, Hajj hijacked by oppressors, Muslims should reconsider management of Hajj (September 2015)

Clothes , Soul , Dead , Sun

“Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same perfect instrument, piercing to the very heart and marrow of the matter; always seizing the essential idea or principle. The same exactness and rapidity of operation, pervading as it did her sensitive as well as her mental faculties, would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and her profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in practical life, would, in the times when such a carrière was open to women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/186/mode/1up pp. 186-187

Nature , Women , Time , Perfection

“History records that those who ruled with an iron hand and implemented oppressive and draconian laws, in the end failed to keep their power. People can endure suppression up to certain limit and a certain period of time; after that they rebel to get rid of callous rulers.”

Mubarak Ali (1941) Historian, activist, scholar

What History Tells Us, p. 8
History, What History Tells Us

History , Time , People , Law

“A ruler that has but an army has one hand, but he who has a navy has both.”

Peter I of Russia (1672–1725) Tsar and 1st Emperor, founder of the Russian Empire

Attributed in Way a River Went: Following the Volga Through the Heart of Russia https://books.google.com/books?id=x9EWDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT163&lpg=PT163&dq=%22A+ruler+that+has+but+an+army+has+one+hand,+but+he+who+has+a+navy+has+both.%22&source=bl&ots=jS__N1LP8U&sig=GuCyl4v-BeAwUpmB1PDaIxAcSeY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjV_9KHxMjeAhXmY98KHTStBRgQ6AEwBHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22A%20ruler%20that%20has%20but%20an%20army%20has%20one%20hand%2C%20but%20he%20who%20has%20a%20navy%20has%20both.%22&f=false (2015), by Thom Wheeler, p. 163

“What is the Jew?...What kind of unique creature is this whom all the rulers of all the nations of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed; persecuted, burned and drowned, and who, despite their anger and their fury, continues to live and to flourish. What is this Jew whom they have never succeeded in enticing with all the enticements in the world, whose oppressors and persecutors only suggested that he deny (and disown) his religion and cast aside the faithfulness of his ancestors?!
The Jew — is the symbol of eternity. … He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Attributed in "The Final Resolution", in Jewish World Periodical (1908), p. 189
Disputed

Faith , Religion , Anger , People

“Allah has commanded rulers to be shepherds; He did not command them to be money-collectors. The attitude of the earliest leaders of this Ummah was that of shepherds, not money-collectors. Soon you will find your leaders becoming money-collectors, not shepherds. Once that happens, there will be no more modesty, trustworthiness or honesty. The best way of running the people's affairs is to examine the Muslims' situation, find out what their dues are and give them to them, and take from them what is due from them. Then go to ahl al-dhimmah and give them what is due to them and take from them what is due from them. Then confront the enemy and seek to defeat them by means of sincerity.”

Uthman (574–656) Companion of Muhammad and third Rashidun Caliph

Letter to Governors of Muslim Empire of Caliphate, quoted in History of the Prophets and Kings, Vol. 5, p. 244

Money , People , Sincerity , Way

“Freedom as a concept sides with those who are struggling for theirs, whereas nonviolence as a concept sides with the enforcers of normality and the rulers of the status quo.”

Peter Gelderloos (1982) American anarchist

Source: "The Failure of Nonviolence" (2013) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-the-failure-of-nonviolence, Chapter 1. Violence Doesn't Exist

Freedom

“Once they had occupied academic bodies, once they had captured universities and thereby determined what will be taught, which books will be prescribed, what questions would be asked, what answers will be acceptable, these historians came to decide what history had actually been! As it suits their current convenience and politics to make out that Hinduism also has been intolerant, they will glide over what Ambedkar says about the catastrophic effect that Islamic invasions had on Buddhism, they will completely suppress what he said of the nature of these invasions and of Muslim rule in his Thoughts on Pakistan,3 but insist on reproducing his denunciations of ‘Brahmanism’, and his view that the Buddhist India established by the Mauryas was systematically invaded and finished by Brahmin rulers.
Thus, they suppress facts, they concoct others, they suppress what an author has said on one matter even as they insist that what he has said on another be taken as gospel truth. And when anyone attempts to point out what had in fact happened, they rise in chorus: a conspiracy to rewrite history, they shout, a plot to distort history, they scream. But they are the ones who have been distorting it in the first place – by suppressing the truth, by planting falsehoods.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998)

History , Question , Nature , Universe

“The most extensive deletions are ordered in regard to the chapter on ‘Aurangzeb’s policy on religion’. Every allusion to what he actually did to the Hindus, to their temples, to the very leitmotif of his rule – to spread the sway of Islam – are directed to be excised from the book. He is to be presented as one who had an aversion – an ordinary sort of aversion, almost a secular one – to music and dancing, to the presence of prostitutes in the court, and that it is these things he banished... In a word, no forcible conversions, no massacres, no destruction of temples. Just that Hinduism had created an exploitative, casteist society. Islam was egalitarian. Hence the oppressed Hindus embraced Islam!
Muslim historians of those times are in raptures at the heap of kafirs who have been dispatched to hell. Muslim historians are forever lavishing praise on the ruler for the temples he has destroyed, for the hundreds of thousands he has got to see the light of Islam. Law books like The Hedaya prescribe exactly the options to which these little textbooks alluded. All whitewashed away.
Objective whitewash for objective history. And today if anyone seeks to restore truth to these textbooks, the shout, ‘Communal rewriting of history’.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998)

Hell , Religion , Time , Law

“It is commonly said that it was the Mahomedans whom the British displaced as rulers in India. This is true only in a restricted sense. It would be nearer the truth to say that it was the Mahrattas in the main, whom we displaced.”

Sir Richard Temple, 1st Baronet (1826–1902) British politician

Sir Richard Temple quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924 (2019)

Sense , Truth

“According to tradition, the Blessed One preordained the Bodhisattva Maitreya as his successor. “And the Blessed One said to Ananda, ‘I am not the first Buddha who has come upon Earth, nor shall I be the last. In due time another Buddha will arise in the world, a Holy One, a supremely enlightened One, endowed with wisdom in conduct, embracing the Universe, an incomparable leader of men, a ruler of devas and mortals. He will reveal to you the same eternal truths, that I have taught you. He will establish his Law, glorious in its origin, glorious at the climax, and glorious at the goal, in the spirit and in the letter. He will proclaim a righteous life, wholly perfect and pure, such as I now proclaim. His disciples will number many thousands while mine number many hundreds.’ “Ananda said, ‘How shall we know him?’ “The Blessed One said, ‘He will be known as Maitreya!’ ”  (Paul Carus, The Gospel of Buddha) The future Buddha, Maitreya, as his name indicates, is the Buddha of compassion and love. This Bodhisattva, according to the power of his qualities, is often called Ajita—the Invincible.”

Helena Roerich (1879–1955) Russian philosopher

Source: Foundations of Buddhism (1930)

Time , Law , Future , Perfection

“Every gentleman here is born a petty tyrant. Practised in acts of despotism and cruelty, we become callous to the dictates of humanity and all the finer feelings of the soul. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes. Habituated from our Infancy to trample upon the Rights of Human Nature, every generous, every liberal Sentiment, if not extinguished, is enfeebled in our Minds; and in such an infernal school are to be educated our future legislators and rulers. The laws of impartial Providence may even by such means as these avenge upon our posterity the injury done to a set of wretches whom our injustice hath debased to a level with the brute creation. These remarks were extorted by a kind of irresistible, perhaps an enthusiastic impulse; and the author of them, conscious of his own good intentions, cares not whom they please or offend.”

George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

Source: Virginia Charters (1773)

School , Soul , Law , Future

“For too long, it was taken for granted that we would survive because we were Dutch; because Holland would take care of us. In our ignorant innocence or innocent ignorance we overlooked the fact that they were, and historically are, the rulers and we the ruled ones, and that power never renders itself; it has to be conquered, if not by sword then by the mind. And we neglected the mind. We have not studied our rulers well enough, otherwise we would have known that we were programmed to think that we are not programmed; that if we looked the other way long enough and denied the existence of colonialism it would automatically disappear. We forgot that we were trained not to see colonialism as colonialism.”

Joceline Clemencia (1952–2011) Curaçaoan writer

Source: Language is More Than Language in the Development of Curaçao https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000136432, 1999

Training , Thinking , Study , Way

“Next, the facts are that there is a Path and that men have trodden it before us; that the swifter evolution is possible; that the laws of it may be known, the conditions of it understood, the stages of it be trodden; and that at the end of that Path there are standing Those Who once were men of the world, but now are the Guardians of the world, the Elder Brethren of our race, the Teachers and the Prophets of the past, stretching upwards in ranks of ever-more dazzling light from the ending of the Path for man to the highest Ruler of the world in which we live.”

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

Source: Initiation, The Perfecting of Man (1923)

Law , Light , Past , Teachers

“What! all of us, Christians, not only profess to love one another, but do actually live one common life; we whose social existence beats with one common pulse—we aid one another, learn from one another, draw ever closer to one another to our mutual happiness, and find in this closeness the whole meaning of life!—and to-morrow some crazy ruler will say some stupidity, and another will answer in the same spirit, and then I must go expose myself to being murdered, and murder men—who have done me no harm—and more than that, whom I love. And this is not a remote contingency, but the very thing we are all preparing for, which is not only probable, but an inevitable certainty.”

Leo Tolstoy The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Source: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience

Drawing , Happiness , Learning , Stupidity

“You must welcome change as the rule but not as your ruler.”

Denis Waitley (1933) American writer

Change

“No tyranny can exist without police powers to enforce the ruler's "laws" and punish rebels or free thinkers. The enforcers are called soldiers when sent to other countries and police when operating inside a country. But their function is the same.”

David Lane (white nationalist) (1938–2007) American white supremacist, convicted felon

Focus Fourteen

Law , Country

“Jihad is the signature tune of Islamic history. If today’s Muslim rulers are reluctant to sound that note, it is often because they are concerned about the consequences of failure.”

M.J. Akbar (1951) journalist, author

Source: Akbar, M. J - The shade of swords_ Jihad and the conflict between Islam and christianity-Routledge (2008)

History , Failure

“It is better to live for just a single day as a ruler than to live for forty years as an abject slave.”

Al-Tabari (839–923) influential Persian scholar, historian and exegete of the Qur'an

Source: Babak Khorramdin's letter to his son, rejecting the caliph’s amnesty message, quoted by Al-Tabari, edited by C. E. Bosworth, History of al-Tabari Vol. 33, The: Storm and Stress along the Northern Frontiers of the 'Abbasid Caliphate: The Caliphate of al-Mu'tasim A.D. 833-842/A.H. 218-227 https://books.google.com/books?id=Ky2rl0xN2SQC&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&dq=%22Better+to+live+for+just+a+single+day+as+a+ruler+than+to+live+for+forty+years+as+an+abject+slave.%22&source=bl&ots=D6-WGySNBR&sig=9MJm8qw6MeNgY1kPHEjtcxA_okY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAmoVChMI2YO62Pb0xwIVjOwUCh2l8APi#v=onepage&q=%22Better%20to%20live%20for%20just%20a%20single%20day%20as%20a%20ruler%20than%20to%20live%20for%20forty%20years%20as%20an%20abject%20slave.%22&f=false