People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

Like Cato, give his little senate laws, and sit attentive to his own applause.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

Everyone assumes I practise all of my own laws but I don’t. I think anybody who did would be a horrible ugly person to be around.

Obama has no way to conceal that Osama was executed in front of his children and wives, who are now under the custody of the authorities of Pakistan, a Muslim country of almost 200 million inhabitants, whose laws have been violated, its national dignity offended, and its religious traditions desecrated.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.

Freedom is a man’s natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

I’ve proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.

My experience with power, you can maintain it, or you get it taken from you. You get you some newfound power and go crazy, and it get taken from you quick.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

But more than anything else, for the British folks Irish people were all terrorists. So when we went to Britain, it was always a lot of resistance to U2. And that’s why we came to America.

Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.

Not necessity, not desire – no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything – health, food, a place to live, entertainment – they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.

That’s the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

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

War – An act of violence whose object is to constrain the enemy, to accomplish our will.

You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.

I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.

You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.

You could tell ‚The Handmaid’s Tale‘ from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.

One of the peculiarities of Delhi is that the term ‚reform‘ is associated only with passing of laws in Parliament. In fact, the most important reforms are those needed, without new laws, at various level of the government, in work practices and procedures.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion.

It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

One thing I hope I’ll never be is drunk with my own power. And anybody who says I am will never work in this town again.

We are the people our parents warned us about.

Experience acquired in the heroic battle against Batista’s tyranny showed that the enemy, no matter what his strength, could not defeat the Cuban people.

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.

These people are very unskilled in arms… with 50 men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

Wherever there is a settled society, religion is necessary; the laws cover manifest crimes, and religion covers secret crimes.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.

Resistance is usually ascribed to bodies at rest, and impulse to those in motion, but motion and rest, as commonly conceived, are only relatively distinguished; nor are those bodies always truly at rest, which commonly are taken to be so.

The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

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.