Zhang Zhidong Quotes

Power-over is resorted to time without number because people will not wait for the slower process of education.

The concept of power we admire is power over someone else.

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.

I realized that both the military and religious orders depend on discipline to shape people - which routine does, in a lot of ways.

Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.

Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, then they are if they were free.

And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

Even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through.

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick.

Disorder is the child of authority and compulsion. Liberty is the mother of order.

Slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations.

Government is force.

My power comes from the military.

We must form men so that they can only will what we wish them to will.

Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

The effect of dominance is not always the result of an intention to dominate.

The violence of our time is caused by obedience.

When the Chinese suspect someone of being a potential troublemaker, they always resort to one of two methods: they crush him, or they hoist him on a pedestal.

Good and decent people must be protected and persuaded by gentle means, but the rabble must be led by terror.

To accept the principal that "all power proceeds from the barrel of a gun" is to accept a society which will be dominated by those with the biggest guns.

States are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power

How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.