Politics and Power

[ Of Franklin D. Roosevelt, after meeting him when Holmes was in his nineties and Roosevelt had just become president, 1933 :] A second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.

 

Many have imagined for themselves republics and principalities that no one has ever seen or known to be in reality. Because how one ought to live is so far removed from how one lives that he who lets go of what is done for that which one ought to do sooner learns ruin than his own preservation.

[ Socrates speaking :] Unless either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophical intelligence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsorily excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucon, for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either. Nor, until this happens, will this constitution which we have been expounding in theory ever be put into practice within the limits of possibility and see the light of the sun.

America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys.

The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.

As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.

 

Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive “owners,” who each in turn, as “patriots,” with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did —and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches, But where there’s so much as half a conversation The Kremlin’s mountaineer will get his mention.

 

A prince must not have any objective nor any thought, nor take up any art, other than the art of war and its ordering and discipline; because it is the only art that pertains to him who commands. And it is of such virtue that not only does it maintain those who were born princes, but many times makes men rise to that rank from private station.

[ Thrasymachus speaking :] I affirm that the just is nothing else than the advantage of the stronger.

Nothing is more difficult to transact, nor more dubious to succeed, nor more dangerous to manage, than to make oneself chief to introduce new orders. Because the introducer has for enemies all those whom the old orders benefit, and has for lukewarm defenders all those who might benefit by the new orders.

Here I was, in a country where a right tosay how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. . . . I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.

The official world, the corridors of power.

 

From this springs a dispute: whether it is better to be loved than feared or the reverse. It is answered that one would want to be both; but, because it is difficult to force them together whenever one has to do without either of the two, it is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

To win a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the highest excellence; the highestexcellence is to subdue the enemy’s armywithout fighting at all.

[ Socrates speaking :] Democracy . . . would, it seems, be a delightful form of government, anarchic and motley, assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike!

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.

 

The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.

 

[ In response to a well-wisher who called out “Now justice will be administered in Washington” as Holmes embarked to take his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, 1902 :] Don’t be too sure. I am going there to administer the law .

 

An illiterate king is a crowned ass.

 

Men must either be caressed or extinguished; because they avenge themselves of light offenses, but of the grave ones they cannot. So the offense one does to a man must be such that one not fear vengeance for it.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,