Veronica Roth Quotes

Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.

I'm Machiavelli's offspring, I'm the king of New York, king of the coast, one hand, I juggle them both.

Give the enemy an inch, he'll take a yard.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Anyone obsessed with power sees enemies everywhere.

Boys, I've just reminded Hubert that I've got his balls in my pocket.

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

Is there any way we can screw him?

Some people get a feeling of power from being unpleasant.

It's not my nature to dominate and bully.

People always use power, that's the unsurprising thing. They use it to try to sleep with who they want to sleep with - women as well as men do that - but I don't understand violence.

Whenever a man can get hold of numbers, they are invaluable: if correct, they assist in informing his own mind, but they are still more useful in deluding the minds of others. Numbers are the masters of the weak, but the slaves of the strong.

There's strong men of wisdom in many different fields. They say 5% of the people are wise and righteous and 10% are wise but use their wiseness for wickedness or to deceive others. It's like a magician: he knows the answer to the trick, but you don't. He has to keep you blind to the truth in order for the illusion to work. When you've got that kind of wisdom and somebody else doesn't, you can always take advantage of them.

Donald Trump clearly doesn't have the intellectual capacity to have a concept of what he's doing. I think he has a very strong instinct for using lying to assert power, and that's what he does. Every time he lies, he's saying "I can say whatever I want, whenever I want to, and there's nothing you can do about it." I think he understands that instinctively. He has a finely honed sense for power and manipulation. Bullying is another way to put it. He's a highly skilled bully, but bullying is not a very sophisticated strategy.

to. I will trick you and deceive you, lie, cheat and steal to find you, tempt you out of your hiding place, and chase you until you have nowhere else to run. I make you this promise: your life is mine

You think my first instinct is to protect you. Because you're small, or a girl, or a Stiff. But you're wrong." He leans his face close to mine and wraps his fingers around my chin. His hand smells like metal. When was the last time he held a gun, or a knife? My skin tingles at the point of contact, like he's transmitting electricity through his skin. "My first instinct is to push you until you break, just to see how hard I have to press." he says, his fingers squeezing at the word break. My body tenses at the edge in his voice, so I am coiled as tight as a spring, and I forget to breathe.

Hit that back-stabber where it hurts, right in the ambition.

The only way you can control people is to lie to them. You can write that down in your book in great big letters. The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them.

You will find ambiguity a great ally on your road to power. Give a sign of Slytherin on one day, and contradict it with a sign of Gryffindor the next; and the Slytherins will be enabled to believe what they wish, while the Gryffindors argue themselves into supporting you as well. So long as there is uncertainty, people can believe whatever seems to be to their own advantage. And so long as you appear strong, so long as you appear to be winning, their instincts will tell them that their advantage lies with you. Walk always in the shadow, and light and darkness both will follow.

It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.

A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.

I have never put a gun to anyone's head to obligate him to marry me.

I shouldn't have to ask for your permission for me to put you in my lie!

Power is a thing of perception. They don't need to be able to kill you. They just need you to think they are able to kill you