Thucydides Quotes

It is always the right of the mighty which prevails over the weak, and that is very primitive.

The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

A heavy aristocracy and corruption are two bridles in the mouths of a people which will prevent them from making any effectual efforts against their masters.

Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.

Aristocracy is always cruel.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

In an ideal world, an individual's institutional power would be correlated perfectly with his or her value-add. In practice, this is seldom the case.

There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave.

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

The strongest absorbs the weakest, and he has a right to do so.

Power is dangerous for those who do not have it.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose; while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose, especially their lives.

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

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

I believe one half of the world is born for the convenience of the other half

Although the ideal of free enterprise could, indeed, lend itself to the uplifting of the human condition, when it is practiced for profit alone, it becomes but a license for the powerful to further enslave the weak.

Oppression is but another name for irresponsible power, if history is to be trusted.

Women to govern men, slaves freemen, are much in the same degree; all being total violations and perversions of the laws of nature and nations.

It is necessary to be very intelligent in the work of oppression.

I don't believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled.

The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must curtsy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to them; their power is at the expense of OUR weakness; their riches of OUR poverty; their pride of OUR degradation; their splendour of OUR wretchedness; their tyranny of OUR servitude.

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.