The Blog

2021-

2021-12-29 a

Editor's Note: Power is seldom used; it is often abused.

“Some think that they will exercise power for the general good, but that is what all those with power have believed. Power is evil in itself, regardless of who exercises it.”

— Ludwig von Mises

“Propaganda is as powerful as heroin; it surreptitiously dissolves all capacity to think.”

— Gil Courtemanche (2007). “A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali”, p.178, Vintage

“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”

— George Carlin

"Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People. There is nothing the political establishment will not do, and no lie they will not tell, to hold on to their prestige and power at your expense."

— Donald J. Trump

“Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”

— Letter from Aldous Huxley to George Orwell (1949)

"Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts."

— Salman Rushdie

"Government is never legitimate; it is always an exercise of force, it is always corrupt, it is always a murderer, it is always a thief, and it is always evil. It can only exist if the majority of people allow it to exist, and in the process give it a false legitimacy so that its stolen power over society can be protected and retained. "

— Gary D. Barnett

“The passion for power over others can never cease to threaten mankind and is always sure of finding new and unforeseen allies in continuing its martyrology.”

— John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, First Lord Acton

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility.

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means."

— John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, First Lord Acton, letter, dated 5 April 1887, to Anglican Archbishop Mandell Creighton

“The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the Bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe.

— Abraham Lincoln

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”

— Benito Mussolini

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