Theme

Power

Rule, force, and the stories states tell. Read beside the liberty shelf. The same centuries produced both the apology for power and the refusal of it.

1. Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.Chinua AchebeA proverb he carried into his essays and interviews
2. Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not.Hannah ArendtEichmann in Jerusalem
3. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.Edmund BurkeThoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents
4. You too, child?Julius CaesarSuetonius, Life of Julius Caesar
5. The die is cast.Julius CaesarSuetonius, Life of Julius Caesar
6. I came, I saw, I conquered.Julius CaesarSuetonius, Life of Julius Caesar
7. The safety of the people shall be the highest law.CiceroDe Legibus
8. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.Charles DickensA Tale of Two Cities
9. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.Frederick DouglassWest India Emancipation speech
10. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.W. E. B. Du BoisThe Souls of Black Folk
11. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.T. S. EliotThe Hollow Men
12. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.Franklin D. RooseveltFirst Inaugural Address
13. Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.Benjamin FranklinReply to the Governor of Pennsylvania
14. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.Samuel JohnsonJames Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson
15. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.James JoyceUlysses
16. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.Ursula K. Le GuinSpeech at the National Book Awards
17. A house divided against itself cannot stand.Abraham LincolnHouse Divided speech
18. It is much safer to be feared than loved, when one of the two must be lacking.Niccolò MachiavelliThe Prince
19. A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.Karl MarxThe Communist Manifesto
20. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.George OrwellPolitics and the English Language
21. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.George OrwellNineteen Eighty-Four
22. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.Jean-Jacques RousseauThe Social Contract
23. Hell is other people.Jean-Paul SartreNo Exit
24. Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar.William ShakespeareJulius Caesar
25. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.Percy Bysshe ShelleyA Defence of Poetry
26. The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThe Gulag Archipelago
27. To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.Sun TzuThe Art of War
28. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.ThucydidesHistory of the Peloponnesian War
29. For the love of money is the root of all evil.Paul the ApostleThe First Letter to Timothy
30. It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.George WashingtonFarewell Address
31. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.W. B. YeatsThe Second Coming

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