Jean Vanier Quotes

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.

There is no more contemptible poison than power over one's fellow men.

The natural course of power is to make the many slaves to the few.

I think it's a dangerous thing for anyone to have power over other people.

Power wears out those who do not have it.

Power is always right, weakness always wrong. Power is always insolent and despotic.

Good masters generally have bad slaves, and bad slaves have good masters.

You can be a control freak only when you have weak people around you.

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

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

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.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

I always remember I'm the monkey and he's the organ-grinder.

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

Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other

Every organism, every human being, must conquer or serve.

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

How many, even of the better sort, would choose to be slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?

Disrespect is the weapon of the weak

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.

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race

Harassment is about power---the undue exercise of power by a superior over a subordinate.

Beware the tyranny of the weak. They just suck you dry.