Quotes about Power

The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth or beauty that mattered. Happiness has got to be paid for. It hasn't been very good for truth of course. But it's been very good for happiness.

Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.

Defending democracy also sounds fine; but to defend democracy by military means, one must be militarily efficient and one cannot become militarily efficient without centralizing power, setting up a tyranny, imposing some form of conscription or slavery to the state. In other words, the miltary defence of democracy in contemporary circumstances entails the abolition of democracy even before war starts.

The Machiavelli of the 20th century will be an advertising man, his Prince , a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time.

_They_ believe that the Ballot will rob them of their Power and Privileges, whereas _I_ am sure that, by the exercise of even such little Prudence and Cunning as parsimonious Nature has endowed them with, they can with ease maintain themselves in their present pre-eminence. This being so, let the Rabble amuse itself by voting. An Election is no more than a gratuitous Punch and Judy Show, offered by the Rulers in order to distract the attention of the Ruled.

His intellectual eminence carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities. The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. . . Murder kills only the individual - and, after all, what is an individual?

The people who make wars, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word- these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

Did you ever feel as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using-you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

But the power problem has its roots in anatomy and biochemistry and temperament. Power has to be curbed on the legal and political levels; that's obvious. But it's also obvious that there must be prevention on the individual level. On the level of instinct and emotion, on the level of the glands and the viscera, the muscles and the blood. If I can ever find the time, I'd like to write a little book on human physiology in relation to ethics, religion, politics and law.

The philosophy that rationalizes power politics and justifies war and military training is always (whatever the official religion of the politicians and war makers) some wildly unrealistic doctrine of national, racial or ideological idolatry, having, as its inevitable corollaries, the notions of Herrenvolk and "the lesser breeds without the Law.