Politics and Power

BATTLE , n . A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.

ALLIANCE , n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.

Whatever happens we have got

Here richly, with ridiculous display,

From politics, it was an easy step to silence.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

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.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

‘But the Emperor has nothing on at all!’ cried a little child.

Written laws are like spiders’ webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

on expanding universities

When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway,

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

The happiness of society is the end of government.

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right … and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

The jaws of power are always opened to devour.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

A government of laws, and not of men.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

The law, in all vicissitudes of government … will preserve a steady undeviating course … On the one hand it is inexorable to the cries of the prisoners; on the other it is deaf, deaf as an adder to the clamours of the populace.

Governing a large nation is like cooking a small fish.

The people are the foundation of the country, and food is of the highest importance to the people.