Provocative thoughts

[thepennyking]

Quotes On Power



Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
1st Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, Lord Chancellor
Solicitor General, Attorney General, Philosopher, Author

“It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty.”

Joan Baez (1941-)
Folksinger, Songwriter and Antiwar Activist

“If it’s natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?”

“The only thing that’s been a worse flop than the organization of non-violence has been the organization of violence.”

“That’s all nonviolence is--organized love.”

Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)
English Economist and Journalist

“The notion of a farseeing and despotic statesman, who can lay down plans for ages yet unborn, is a fancy generated by the pride of the human intellect to which facts give no support.”

“The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions.”

“A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.”

“An influential member of parliament has not only to pay much money to become such, and to give time and labour, he has also to sacrifice his mind too--at least all the characteristics part of it that which is original and most his own.”

“Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.”

“The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.”

F. Lee Bailey (1933-)
Defense Attorney

“Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn’t even get out of committee.”

Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876)
Russian Revolutionary and Author

“Where the State begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.”

“Man is only truly free only among equally free men.”

“The State is the organized authority, domination, and power of the possessing classes over the masses the most flagrant, the most cynical, and the most complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal solidarity of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving all the rest. This flagrant negation of humanity which constitutes the very essence of the State is, from the standpoint of the State, its supreme duty and its greatest virtue. Thus, to offend, to oppress, to despoil, to plunder, to assassinate or enslave one’s fellowman is ordinarily regarded as a crime. In public life, on the other hand, from the standpoint of patriotism, when these things are done for the greater glory of the State, for the preservation or the extension of its power, it is all transformed into duty and virtue. This explains why the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a series of revolting crimes; why kings and ministers, past and present, of all times and all countries--statesmen, diplomats, bureaucrats, and warriors--if judged from the standpoint of simply morality and human justice, have a hundred, a thousand times over earned their sentence to hard labor or to the gallows. There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: ‘for reasons of state.’”

“The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.”

“To do away with this reciprocal influence is tantamount to death. And in demanding the freedom of the masses we do not intend to do away with natural influences to which man is subjected by individuals and groups. All we want is to do away with is factitious. legitimized influences. to do away with the privileges in exerting influence.”

“And in this day and age what is it that constitutes the principle underlying the power of the State? Why, it is science. Yes, science--Science of government, science of administration and financial science; the science of fleecing the flocks of the people without their bleating too loudly and, when they start to bleat, the science of urging silence, patience and obedience upon them by means of a scientifically organised force: the science of deceiving and dividing the masses of the people and keeping them allays in a salutary ignorance lest they ever become able, by helping one another and pooling their efforts, to conjure up a power capable of overturning States.”

“It clearly follows that to make men moral it is necessary to make their social environment moral. And that can be done in only one way; by assuring the triumph of justice, that is, the complete liberty of everyone in the most perfect equality for all. Inequality of conditions and rights, and the resulting lack of liberty for all, is the great collective iniquity begetting all individual iniquities.”

“Man does not become man, nor does he achieve awareness or realization of his humanity, other than in society and in the collective movement of the whole society; he only shakes off the yoke of internal nature through collective or social labor. . . and without his material emancipation there can be no intellectual or moral emancipation for anyone. . . man in isolation can have no awareness of his liberty. Being free for man means being acknowledged, considered and treated as such by another man, and by all the men around him. Liberty is therefore a feature not of isolation but of interaction, not of exclusion but rather of connection. . . I myself am human and free only to the extent that I acknowledge the humanity and liberty of all my fellows. . . I am properly free when all the men and women about me are equally free. Far from being a limitation or a denial of my liberty, the liberty of another is its necessary condition and confirmation.”

“Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker.”

“The state is a force incarnate. Worse, it is the silly parading of force. It never seeks to prevail by persuasion. Whenever it thrusts its finger into anything it does so in the most unfriendly way. Its essence is command and compulsion.”

“In every State, the government is nothing but a permanent conspiracy on the part of the minority against the majority, which it enslaves and fleeces.”

Honore de Balzac (1800-1850)
French Novelist

“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”

“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”

Stanley Baldwin (1864-1947)
British Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Member of Parliament

“War would end if the dead could return.”

“Let us never forget this: since the day of the air, the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defense of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine. That is where our frontier lies.”

“The only defense is offense, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you wish to save yourselves.”

“[Politicians] rather resemble Alice in Wonderland, who tried to play croquet with a flamingo instead of a mallet.”

http://www.onpower.org/quotes/b.html