Quotes to inspire and reflect

I will have this done, so I order it done; let my will replace reasoned judgement.

It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens.

It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear; and yet that commonly is the case of kings.

And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

A Stalin functionary admitted, ‘Innocent people were arrested: naturally—otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.’

Generally, nobody behaves decently when they have power.

[Hitler] must blood his hounds and show them sport, or else, like Actaeon of old, be devoured by them.

It is an observation no less just than common, that there is no stronger test of a man’s real character than power and authority, exciting, as they do, every passion, and discovering every latent vice.

No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades—that of government.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

A party is perpetually corrupted by personality.

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

A nation never falls but by suicide.

The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall.

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.

Of all the sources of human pride, mere wealth is the basest and most vulgar-minded. Real gentlemen are almost invariably above this low feeling.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

Laws are like spider’s webs: if some poor weak creature come up against them, it is caught; but a bigger one can break through and get away.

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts . . . perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Not Guilty.’

He has been called a mediocre man; but this is unwarranted flattery. He was a politician of monumental littleness.

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.