Power Maintenance Quotes

An empire founded by arms, must likewise have arms for its support.

The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.

Well used are those cruelties (if it is permitted to speak well of evil) that are carried out in a single stroke, done out of necessity to protect oneself, and are not continued but are instead converted into the greatest possible benefits for the subjects. Badly used are those cruelties which. although being few at the outset, grow with the passing time instead of disappearing. Those who follow the first method can remedy their condition with God and with men; the others cannot possibly survive.

When I was growing up, it was 'Communists'. Now it's 'Terrorists'. So you always have to have somebody to fight and be afraid of, so the war machine can build more bombs, guns, and bullets and everything.

The Communist Party and the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are the same in some ways ... To stay in power you've got to give people a good life and improve the economy.

Everything is selected by the central government without good judgment or an understanding of culture to make it really safe. They will become nobody to maintain their power and be raised to the next higher level.

This claim of being a Muslim State is of course only a camouflage. It is a screen to dupe the common man, so that he may not see clearly that Pakistan is a feudal State in which a clique is trying by these methods to maintain itself in power.

I think it's funny. There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they're afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever thought that that's all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex structure, with all your laws and guns - just somebody naming the exact nature of what you're doing?

Individuals and classes which have lost the force to maintain themselves in power make themselves more and more hated because of their outbursts of random violence. The strong man strikes only when it is absolutely necessary, and then nothing stops him. Trajan was strong, not violent: Caligula was violent, not strong.

My experience with power, you can maintain it, or you get it taken from you. You get you some newfound power and go crazy, and it get taken from you quick.

People in power need to control others in order to maintain power. One of the ways to do that is to take that which is threatening and demonize it.

Let us be terrible in order to prevent the people from being terrible themselves!

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.

And when people in power can stay in power they do very little to tinker with the apparatus that put them in power.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

I am not a dictator, and I do not think I will become one. I will not maintain power with a machine gun.

The old Establishment has always preserved its position by not being too exclusive - it has been wily enough to absorb the up-and-coming and convert them to their attitudes and mannerisms.

If we are going to stay a great power and I hope and pray we will we need the truth. We need to know what is going right and we need to know what is going wrong. There is no greater time than now.

Power tends to protect itself merely to maintain its own status and control. Principle gives up power for the sake of creating the best public policy.

Maintaining legitimacy in an authoritarian state is very difficult.

Some princes, so as to hold securely the state, have disarmed their subjects, others have kept their subject towns distracted by factions...Our forefathers, and those who were reckoned wise, were accustomed to say that it was necessary to hold Pistoia [an Italian city] by factions and Pisa by fortress, and with this idea they fostered quarrels in some of their tributary towns so as to keep possession of them the more easily.

All governments must maintain power through consent, not coercion.

Great powers can't get tired, because the international order is not self-governing.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

I am struggling to maintain the government, not to overthrow it. I am struggling especially to prevent others from overthrowing it.