Voltaire Quotes

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.

Men still have to be governed by deception.

Power is an instrument of fatal consequence. It is confined no more readily than quicksilver, and escapes good intentions as easily as air flows through mesh.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Patriotism ... for rulers is nothing else than a tool for achieving their power-hungry and money-hungry goals, and for the ruled it means renouncing their human dignity, reason, conscience, and slavish submission to those in power. ... Patriotism is slavery.

The people may be made to follow a path of action, but they may not be made to understand 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

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is clever enough to enslave you.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

I'm Machiavelli's offspring, I'm the king of New York, king of the coast, one hand, I juggle them both.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

Conquerors never, never conquer a nation to bring freedom. They brought control.

A strength to harm is perilous in the hand of an ambitious head.

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

The concept of power we admire is power over someone else.

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

The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things.

You carry forever the fingerprint that comes from being under someone's thumb.

The world is full of little dictators trying to run your life.

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

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny.

What the power structure is afraid of is that we're going to learn to recognize the truth when we hear it.