Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.
All forms of power - even based on the consensus of the democratic system - react when they are being attacked, or when those who exercise power become a target.
A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.
Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.
I truly believe that all power corrupts. Such is probably the thinking behind every political film ever made in Hollywood.
For when we talk about the spreading power and influence of globalization, aren't we really referring to the spreading economic and military might of the US?
It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential.
...an irresistible sleep fell deeply on his eyes, the sweetest, soundest oblivion, still as the sleep of death itself...
Stands the clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?
I believe that true beauty of chess is more than enough to satisfy all possible demands.
The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.
What law, what reason can deny that gift so sweet, so natural that God has given a stream, a fish, a beast, a bird?
The truth is, I have more money than I'm interested in spending. Everyone in my family is taken care of.
I suspect there isn't an actor alive who was able to truthfully answer his family's questions after his first day's activity in his future profession.
I think that's become passe, but if you can surround yourself with a kind of monument to yourself and your family - a statement - and you can afford it, then that's a noble project.
In China, the dead are not forgotten - my relatives cheerfully pointed out all the niches of deceased friends and family, as if gesturing at the homes of the living.
No journalist has ever been in my house and no photographs have ever been taken of where I live. I don't parade my family out for display, which is the way it will stay.