Divide and Rule Quotes

It's probably better to have the son-of-a-bitch inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.

The game of politics is to make you afraid so that you don’t think.

Divide and conquer. Get your adversaries fighting among themselves

We will stand by Punjab, Punjabis and Punjabiat, unlike Parkash Singh Badal, who makes Chandigarh, river waters and other emotive issues his bread and butter during the elections.

When politicians use fear, they are playing into the enemy's hand.

Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there.

When you are in the government, you have to demonise your opposition.

President Obama has been attacking relentlessly. In 2008 he said that if you're out of fresh ideas you use stale tactics against your opponent - you try and make your opponent unacceptable and that's what he is trying to do.

Ineptitude and negligence directed British policies in India more than any cynical desire to divide and rule, but the British were not above exploiting rivalries.

There's a reason people run negative ads... it's because they work.

Look at how the British covered India with railroads, and it is easy to view them as modernisers. Look, however, at the abysmal levels of mass illiteracy in the subcontinent they left behind in 1947, and they appear rather differently.

Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians.

Somehow politicians have become convinced that negative campaigning pays off in elections.

One of the regime's most important tactics is the creation of a third force in the country.

In 1907, Britain and Russia signed a treaty dividing Iran between them; no Iranian was at the negotiations or even knew they were taking place.

In the past, the greatest weapon the white man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer. If I take my hand and slap you, you don't even feel it. It might sting you because these digits are separated. But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together.

I have become an adjective. There is something called a Rovian-style of campaigning and it's meant as an insult. One columnist said it consists mainly of throwing mud until it sticks. One prominent blogger described the elements of a textbook Rovian race as fear-based, smear-based and anything goes.

[Advising a member of his cabinet on handling the cabinet: Never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.

The most effective way to close down the human mind and to manipulate its sense of self is to program into it some form of dogma. A dogma will always vehemently defend itself from other information and repel any alternative opinion which contradicts its narrow, solidified view. Dogmas become a person's sense of security and means of retaining power, and humanity tends to cling to both until its knuckles turn white. Dogmas take endless forms, and when you can persuade different people to hold opposing dogmas, the manipulation of conflict and control through "divide and rule" becomes easy.

Put two or three men in positions of conflicting authority. This will force them to work at loggerheads, allowing you to be the ultimate arbiter.

History shows that attacks on general freedoms often begin with an attack on the freedom of a minority. It teaches us that we should never allow a government to divide and rule. An attack on one is an attack on all.

I don't let the left hand know what the right hand is doing.

We seem at, the present time to have arrived at the acute stage of the colonial fever which during the last three or four years has afflicted the various powers of Europe. Germany is vying with France, England with both, in the haste to seize upon “unoccupied” countries, and to establish “protectorates” – the cant diplomatic for incomplete annexation – over uncivilized peoples.

The modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace. It was a peace presaged by the nickname given the region by covetous British leaders in wartime: 'The Great Loot.'

There's much about the British Raj which I think is disreputable. It was rapacious; it was a sort of kleptocracy, and it was also racist. Indians were not treated as equals.