Mario Puzo Quotes

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.

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

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.

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?

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

Power is what men seek, and any group that gets it will abuse it. It is the same story.

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race

Power always has a direction. It is always downward, towards the weak but power is often confused with what is right

Americans don't like powerful figures who punch down, that is, who pick on someone less powerful and less able to speak for themselves than they are.

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

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

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

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

Either you're the one erasing or you're the one being erased.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it.

Raise your eyes and count the small gang of your oppressors who are only strong through the blood they suck from you and through your arms which you lend them unwillingly.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

Power is dangerous for those who do not have it.

Coalitions are but the unjust subjection of one people to another.

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