Politics and Power

The relation of master and servant is advantageous only to masters who do not scruple to abuse their authority, and to servants who do not scruple to abuse their trust.

Great men refuse titles because they are jealous of them.

It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.

Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.

The assassin Czolgosz made President McKinley a hero by assassinating him. The United States of America made Czolgosz a hero by the same process.

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.

The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.

Marriage, or any other form of promiscuous amoristic monogamy, is fatal to large States because it puts its ban on the deliberate breeding of man as a political animal.

A colonial Imperialist is one who raises colonial troops, equips a colonial squadron, claims a Federal Parliament sending its measures to the Throne instead of to the Colonial Office, and, being finally brought by this means into insoluble conflict with the insular British Imperialist, "cuts the painter" and breaks up the Empire.

Excess of local self-assertion makes a colonist an Imperialist.

Government presents only one problem: the discovery of a trustworthy anthropometric method.

Excess of insularity makes a Briton an Imperialist.

Democratic republics can no more dispense with national idols than monarchies with public functionaries.

If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

The flunkeyism propagated by the throne is the price we pay for its political convenience.

The Court is the servant's hall of the sovereign.

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. When the process is interrupted by adversity at a critical age, as in the case of Charles II, the subject becomes sane and never completely recovers his kingliness.

When the wooden idol does not answer the peasant's prayer, he beats it: when the flesh and blood idol does not satisfy the civilized man, he cuts its head off.

He who slays a king and he who dies for him are alike idolaters.

A limited monarchy is a device for combining the inertia of a wooden idol with the credibility of a flesh and blood one.

The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters.