Mark Waid Quotes

In every tyrant's heart there springs in the end this poison, that he cannot trust a friend.

A usurper always distrusts the whole world.

Anyone obsessed with power sees enemies everywhere.

Politics—where they pat you on the back so they'll know where to stick the knife.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesize and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

Two forms of government are favorable to the prevalence of falsehood and deceit. Under a Despotism, men are false, treacherous, and deceitful through fear, like slaves dreading the lash. Under a Democracy they are so as a means of attaining popularity and office, and because of the greed for wealth.

For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends.

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.

Give a man a free hand and he'll try to put it all over you.

A good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

In order to obtain and hold power a man must love it. Thus the effort to get it is not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, craft and cruelty.

Those who administer or possess governing power, always try to surround their high-handed actions with a cloak of legality, and to persuade the people that they act from good motives; this they are easily able to effect when they are the sole interpreters of the law;

They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them for their blindness.

In conspiracies, men who know what they wanted commonly ended by controlling the men who did not.

Tyranny's disease, to trust no friends

Dictators are the last to know.

Suspect power more than vice.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

Treat your friends as if they were going to be your enemies one day.

Freedom: ah! I can say it without phrases ... and it is my belief that I have never loved her more, never served her better on this day when I am doing my best to unmask her enemies, who deck themselves out in her colours, who usurp her flag to soil it, to dishonor it.

He who appears to command people but in fact accommodates himself to wrath and ambition and pleasure, … will not know how to dispose of the power