Politics and Power

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.

Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?

A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone.

Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world.

Most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea.

I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.

By art is created that great Leviathan, called a commonwealth or state, (in Latin civitas) which is but an artificial man … and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul.

Maximilien Robespierre was nothing but the hand of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the bloody hand that drew from the womb of time the body whose soul Rousseau had created.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.

Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!

How small, of all that human hearts endure,

I always voted at my party’s call,

The House of Peers, throughout the war,

Are you a politician who says to himself: ‘I will use my country for my own benefit’? … Or are you a devoted patriot, who whispers in the ear of his inner self: ‘I love to serve my country as a faithful servant.’

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

There is an invisible hand in politics that operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market. In politics, individuals who seek to promote only the public good are led by an invisible hand to promote special interests that it was no part of their intention to promote.

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

In every well-governed state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.