Robert Graves Quotes

All writers on the science of policy are agreed, and they agree with experience, that all governments must frequently infringe the rules of justice to support themselves; that truth must give way to dissimulation, honesty to convenience, and humanity itself to the reigning of interest. The whole of this mystery of iniquity is called the reason of state.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

The purification of politics is an iridescent dream. Government is force.... The Decalogue and the Golden Rule have no place in a political campaign. The commander who lost the battle through the activity of his moral nature would be the derision and jest of history.

To Than Shwe, a kingdom in return for the eternal soul is just the right egregious trade-off. Than Shwe is a general who carries the light of unbounded ambition.

Afghans long ago resigned themselves to this sort of thing. Compromises must be made. Deals with the devil are better than ceaseless butchery. In the exigencies of post-conflict bygones, against the threat of collapse into more terrible bloodletting, the ugliness of realpolitik is the lesser evil.

Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.

Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'

Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.

Backward cities, or younger cities, or newly forming cities in supply regions, have to develop to a great extent on one another's shoulders. This is one of the terrible things about empires.

It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

And here one must not that hatred is acquired just as much by means of good actions as by bad ones; and so, as I said above, if a prince wishes to maintain the state, he is often obliged not to be good; because whenever that group which you believe you need to support you is corrupted, whether it be the common people, the soldiers, or the nobles, it is to your advantage to follow their inclinations in order to satisfy them; and then good actions are your enemy.

We become accomplices in evil every time we seek to soothe the unslakable appetites of the crime family that sits in Pyongyang.

In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments, the leader may have to 'enter into evil.' This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired, and challenging. It is why we are drawn to him still.

I don't see much use in general slogans. Sometimes it is worth resisting evil with lesser evil, very commonly in fact.

Men imitate the gods whom they adore, and to such miserable beings their crimes become their religion.

I think it's a mistake to view North Korea as a government. It really is more like a criminal syndicate.

Little crimes breed big crimes. You smile at little crimes and then big crimes blow your head off.

Vladimir Putin has this animalistic instinct of all dictators: He smells weakness. To quote Winston Churchill's definition of appeasement: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels.

An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.

I was only an aspiring dictator. I was never a real dictator.

The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one, analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.

The triumph of morality: A thief who has broken into a bedroom claims his sense of shame had been outraged, and by threatening theoccupants with exposure of an immoral act he blackmails them into not bringing charges for burglary.

I heard that senior officials in China and the United States were discussing whether to encourage a coup in North Korea to get a more pliable ruler. So I've taken steps to ensure that this can't happen. The man in our government closest to the Chinese, who could have arranged such a coup attempt, was my uncle. The man who would have been my natural replacement was my half brother. Both have been liquidated, as have more than 100 disloyal high-level officials.