Thucydides Quotes

There is no peace now, and there will never be peace, so long as one rules over another.

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

In every human society, there is an effort continually tending to confer on one part the height of power and happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and misery. The intent of good laws is to oppose this effort and to diffuse their influence universally and equally.

Justice often means taking power from some who have it and giving it to some who do not.

Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

When you are about to badger the weak, Then imagine yourself before a more powerful man.

… neither the sanctions of international law nor the justice of a cause can be depended upon for a fair settlement of differences, when they come into conflict with a strong political necessity on the one side opposed to comparative weakness on the other.

The tyranny of some is possible only through the cowardice of others.

If the strong exploit the weak, democracy will not be stable.

Disrespect is the weapon of the weak

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.

Free people can treat each other justly, but they can't make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end.

If given a choice, I would have certainly selected to be what I am: one of the oppressed instead of one of the oppressors.

There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.

In a confrontation with the politics of power, the soft center has always melted away.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.

Palestinians have had to live for a long time with the fact that Israelis had power over them in their everyday lives.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

The weak are more likely to make the strong weak than the strong are likely to make the weak strong.