Henry A. Wallace Quotes

One hopes that they'll never be able to use mind control weapons, because we're all done for if that happens. I don't want military people, or political people, to have that type of power over those of us who just get by from day to day.

All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

The essence of American politics consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism.

Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

The masses are absolutely being manipulated by those in power.

There are men who will hold power by any means rather than not hold it; and who would prefer a dissolution of the union to a continuance of an administration not of their own party. They will risk all ills ... rather than permit that happiness which is dispensed by other hands than their own.

A democracy is a state which recognizes the subjection of the minority to the majority, that is, an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one part of the population against another.

Modernization vastly increased the power of the state. It gave the rulers new tools—the powers of indoctrination, surveillance, and repression.

Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is. They are addicts, and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal — like all junkies.

As long as the [Communist] Party remains the ultimate source of wealth and power, its ability to police itself will determine China’s fate.

Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.

The Statist has an insatiable appetite for control. His sights are set on his next meal even before he has fully digested his last. He is constantly agitating for government action. And in furtherance of that purpose, the Statist speaks in the tongue of the demagogue, concocting one pretext and grievance after another to manipulate public perceptions and build popular momentum for the divestiture of liberty and property from its rightful possessors.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Government is an apparatus of compulsion and coercion.

The American Fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact.... They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power, so that using the power of the State and the power of the market simultaneously they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

There is no alienation that a little power will not cure.

Whom does undeserved honour please, and undeserved blame alarm, but the base and the liar?

For it must be noted, that men must either be caressed or else annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones; the injury therefore that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance.

The only way you can control people is to lie to them. You can write that down in your book in great big letters. The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them.

Real power does not consist in the ability to inflict capital punishment upon the subjects, but in the will and the ability to protect the subjects against the world.

A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.

Politicians have always coveted the liberties we hold.

Power's footstool is opinion and his throne the human heart.

The problem with politics isn't the money; it's the power.

A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.