Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [221-240] of 1236 Power quotesPower QuotesPower Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.~ Sir Winston Churchill You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! – of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.~ Sir Winston Churchill Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: 'We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls.'~ Sir Winston Churchill Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.~ Sir Winston Churchill In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.~ Sir Winston Churchill Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.~ Sir Winston Churchill When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.~ Sir Winston Churchill The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charges known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgment by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments...Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilisation.~ Winston Churchill This truth may be unfashionable, unpalatable, no doubt unpopular, but, if it is the truth, the story of mankind shows that war was universal and unceasing for millions of years before armaments were invented or armies organized. Indeed, the lucid intervals of peace and order only occurred in human history after armaments in the hands of strong governments have come into being, and civilization in every age has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and superior discipline.~ Winston Churchill The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.~ Winston Churchill The public library is the most dangerous place in town.~ John Ciardi We are taxed in our bread and our wine, in our incomes and our investments, on our land and on our property not only for base creatures who do not deserve the name of men, but for foreign nations, complaisant nations who will bow to us and accept our largesse and promise us to assist in the keeping of the peace - these mendicant nations who will destroy us when we show a moment of weakness or our treasury is bare, and surely it is becoming bare! We are taxed to maintain legions on their soil, in the name of law and order and the Pax Romana, a document which will fall into dust when it pleases our allies and our vassals. We keep them in precarious balance only with our gold. Is the heartblood of our nation worth these? Were they bound to us with ties of love, they would not ask our gold. They take our very flesh, and they hate and despise us. And who shall say we are worthy of more? ... When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself.~ Marcus Tullius Cicero A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.~ Marcus Tullius Cicero A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?~ Marcus Tullius Cicero To freemen, threats are impotent. [Lat., Nulla enim minantis auctoritas apud liberos est.]~ Marcus Tullius Cicero Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others.~ Marcus Tullius Cicero But we’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.~ Ramsey Clark America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to denigration without the usual interval of civilization.~ Georges Clemenceau The Bush administration continues to coddle China, despite its continuing crackdown on democratic reform, its brutal subjugation of Tibet, its irresponsible export of nuclear and missile technology... Such forbearance on our part might have made sense during the Cold War when China was the counterweight to Soviet power. It makes no sense to play the China card now when our opponents have thrown in their hand.~ Bill Clinton We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans...~ Bill Clinton Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print