ANGELS AND DEMONS

Quotes on Good and Evil and Power and Truth

John Lord Acton

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Alfred Adler

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

Aesop

Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant ... must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves.

Anacharsis

Laws are like cobwebs that entangle the weak but are broken by the strong.

Francis Bacon

Knowledge is power.

Jeremy Bentham

All punishment is itself evil.

Napoleon Bonaparte

If I were to give liberty to the press, my power could not last three days.

Soldiers usually win the battles and generals get the credit for them.

John Bright

Force is not a remedy ...

Allan Bullock

... evil is a form of incompetence.

Edmund Burke

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

Thomas Campbell

What millions died that Caesar might be great!

Miguel de Cervantes

The man who fights for his ideals is alive.

Count Ciano

Victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.

Cicero

Laws are silent in time of war.

Oliver Cromwell

... by the bowels of Christ ... bethink you that you may be mistaken.

Eugene Debs

I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it.

Dwight Eisenhower

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

John Elting

A basic truth of statecraft: get the fashionable intellectuals on your side and you can get away with murder.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.

Frantz Fanon

The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much bigger business of plunder.

Henry Fielding

Let no man be sorry he has done good, because others have done evil.

E. M. Forster

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood, too ...

Anatole France

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets, and stealing bread.

Benjamin Franklin

We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

Frederick the Great

I begin by taking. I shall find scholars afterwards to demonstrate my perfect right.

Erich Fromme

The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.

Mahondas Gandhi

As in laws or in war, the longest purse finally wins.

William Godwin

Power is not happiness.

William Hazlitt

Ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice.

Heinrich Heine

Whenever books are burned, sooner or later men also are burned.

Hermann Hesse

Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.

Adolf Hitler

The great strength of a totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.

I am liberating man from the degrading chimera known as `conscience'.

The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one.

Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.

What luck for rulers that men do not think.

Mass demonstrations must burn into the little man's soul the conviction that though a little worm he is part of a great dragon.

William James

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Thomas Jefferson

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

Samuel Johnson

How come we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?

Power is gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant and consistent.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

Joseph Joubert

Abuse of words [is] the foundation of ideology.

Immanuel Kant

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.

Henry Kissinger

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Baron Lane

Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight. Oppression doesn't stand on the doorstep with toothbrush mustache and swastika armband-it creeps up insidiously . . . step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realizes that it is gone.

Harold Laski

Historically, means cannot be separated from ends ...

Vladimir Lenin

Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureacracy, no police, no standing army.

Pope Leo XIII

Inequality of rights and power proceeds from the very Author of nature ...

Martin Luther

An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, some serfs ...

Niccolo Machiavelli

... the end justifies the means.

A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promises.

Joseph de Maistre

Every country has the government it deserves.

Mao Zedung

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Charles de Montesquieu

... every man who has power is impelled to abuse it.

Power should be a check on power.

Benito Mussolini

It was only one life. What is one life in the affairs of a state?

The press of Italy is free, freer than the press of any other country, so long as it supports the regime.

What the proletariat needs is a bath of blood.

Martin Niemoeller

In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Friedrich Nietzche

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Andre Norton

Either the law exists, or it does not.

There's no night without stars.

George Orwell

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

If thought corrupts language, language also corrupts thought.

Thomas Paine

The protection of a man's person is more sacred than the protection of his property.

St. Paul

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.

The Qu'ran

... if any one slew a person ... it would be as if he slew the whole people; and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he had saved the life of the whole people ...

Thomas Reed

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils of this world are to be cured by legislation.

Adrienne Rich

Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

... great power involves great responsibility.

... the only thing we have to fear is fear itself --- nameless, unreasoning terror which paralyzes needed efforts ...

Theodore Roosevelt

No man is justified in doing evil on ground of expediency.

Power always brings with it responsibility.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

By doing good we become good.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state what the safety valve is to the steam engine.

William Shakespeare

The devil is a gentleman.

Joseph Stalin

Mr. Churchill, Mr. Prime Minister, how many divisions did you say that the pope had?

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

Gloria Steinem

The ends and means are a seamless web.

Tacitus

Lust of power is the most flagrant of all the passions.

Rabindranath Tagore

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

Law! What do I care about the law? Haven't I got the power?

George Washington

Show not yourself glad in the Misfortune of another though he were your enemy.

They will avoid ... those Overgrown Military establishements which ... are ... particularly hostile to Republican liberty.

Oscar Wilde

A thing is not necessarily true because a man died for it.

Emile Zola

When truth is buried underground, it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.