Denis Diderot Quotes

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

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

Power tends to get confused with repression.

You must labor until we have dominion over the minds and bodies of every important person in your nation.

The desire to order other people around and make them conform to one own's vision takes many forms.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Powerlessness also corrupts.

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

Once a person insists on how you are to think he immediately begins to insist on how you are to behave.

Power over a man's support is a power over his will.

It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.

Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.

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

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

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.

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

All men would be tyrants if they could.

The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.

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

I just want to conquer people and their souls.

Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

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.

The tyrant is only the slave turned inside out.