Power Quotes

“Propaganda is only successful when it is in harmony with something in the patient: his desire for an immortal soul, for health, for the greatness of his nation, or what not. Where there is no such fundamental reason for acquiescence, the assertions of authority are viewed with cynical scepticism. One of the advantages of democracy, from the governmental point of view, is that it makes the average citizen easier to deceive, since he regards the government as his government.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“The employee differs from a slave in the fact that he is free to change his job if he can, and in his right to spend his non-working hours as he pleases. The analogy that I wish to bring out is in relation to government. Tyrannies, oligarchies, and democracies differed in their relations to free men; in relation to slaves, they were all alike. Similarly in a capitalist industrial enterprise the power may be divided among investors monarchically, oligarchically, or democratically, but employees, unless they are investors, have no share in it whatever, and are thought to have as little claim as slaves were thought to have in antiquity.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“The principle that we ought to obey God rather than man has been interpreted by Christians in two different ways. God's commands may be conveyed to the individual conscience either directly, or indirectly through the medium of the Church. No one except Henry VIII and Hegel has ever held, until our own day, that they could be conveyed through the medium of the State.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“Minden szervezetben, de különösen az államokban, a kormányzás problémájának két oldala van. Egyfelől, a kormányzat szemszögéből az a probléma, hogy biztosítani kell a kormányzottak belenyugvását. A kormányzottak szempontjából pedig az a probléma, hogy el kell érniük: a kormányzat ne csak a saját érdekeit vegye figyelembe, hanem az alárendeltek érdekeit is. Ha e probléma bármelyikét sikerül teljességgel megoldani, akkor a másik probléma fel sem merül; ha egyik sincs megoldva, akkor forradalom tör ki. Rendszerint azonban kompromisszumos megoldás születik. A nyers erőtől eltekintve, olyan tényezők állnak a kormányzat oldalán, mint a hagyomány, a vallás, a félelem a külső ellenségtől, és az a természetes kívánság, hogy az emberek legtöbbje vezetőt akar követni. A kormányzottak védelmére eddig csak egyetlen olyan módszert találtak, amely valamelyest hatékony, ez pedig a demokrácia.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power

“Except when he feels enthusiasm for a leader, the voter in a large democracy has so little sense of power that he often does not think it worth while to use his vote. If he is not a keen propagandist for one of the parties, the vastness of the forces that decide who shall govern makes his own part in them appear completely negligible. In practice, all that he can do, as a rule, is to vote for one or other of two men, whose programmes may not interest him, and may differ very little, and who, he knows, may with impunity abandon their programmes as soon as they are elected. If, on the other hand, there is a leader whom he enthusiastically admires, the psychology involved is that which we considered in connection with monarchy: it is that of the tie between a king and the tribe or sect of his active supporters. Every skilful political agitator or organiser devotes himself to stimulating devotion to an individual. If the individual is a great leader, the result is one-man government; if he is not, the caucus which has secured his election becomes the real power.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“One of the most important purposes of government should be to prevent issues from becoming so acute as to lead to civil war; and from this point of view democracy, where it is habitual, is probably preferable to any other known form of government. The difficulty of democracy, as a form of government, is that it demands a readiness for compromise. The beaten party must not consider that a principle is involved of such importance as to make it pusillanimous to yield; on the other hand, the majority must not press the advantage to the point at which it provokes a revolt. This requires practice, respect for the law, and the habit of believing that opinions other than one's own may not be a proof of wickedness. What is even more necessary, there must not be a state of acute fear, for, when there is such a state, men look for a leader and submit to him when found, with the result that he probably becomes a dictator. Given these conditions, democracy is capable of being the most stable form of government hitherto devised.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“A government is usually called ‘democratic’ if a fairly large percentage of the population has a share of political power. The most extreme Greek democracies excluded women and slaves, and America considered itself a democracy before women had the vote. Clearly an oligarchy approaches more nearly to a democracy as the percentage possessed of political power increases. The characteristic features of oligarchy only appear when this percentage is rather small.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“We have seen that monarchy and oligarchy have both merits and demerits. The principal demerit of both is that, sooner or later, the government becomes so indifferent to the desires of ordinary men that there is revolution”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“Men who are strongly influenced by a creed differ from the average in their power to be moved by something more or less abstract and more or less remote from daily life. If such men control an unpopular government, the result is to make the bulk of the population even more frivolous and thoughtless than it would naturally be—a result which is much promoted by the knowledge that all thought is potentially heretical, and therefore dangerous. The rulers, in a theocracy, are likely to be fanatics; being fanatics, they will be severe; being severe, they will be opposed; being opposed, they will become more severe. Their power-impulses will wear, even to themselves, the cloak of religious zeal, and will therefore be subject to no restraint. Hence the rack and the stake, the Gestapo and the Cheka.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“The Bolshevik theory requires that every country, sooner or later, should go through what Russia is going through now. And in every country in such a condition we may expect to find the government falling into the hands of ruthless men, who have not by nature any love for freedom, and who will see little importance in hastening the transition from dictatorship to freedom … Is it not almost inevitable that men placed as the Bolsheviks are placed in Russia … will be loath to relinquish their monopoly of power, and will find reasons for remaining until some new revolution ousts them?”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“A government of the rich prevailed in all the free cities of the Middle Ages, and survived in Venice until Napoleon extinguished it. Such governments have been, on the whole, more enlightened and astute than any others known to history. Venice, in particular, steered a prudent course through centuries of complicated intrigue, and had a diplomatic service far more efficient than that of any other State. Money made in commerce is made by cleverness which is not dictatorial, and this characteristic is displayed by governments composed of successful merchants. The modern industrial magnate is a totally different type, partly because he deals largely with the technical manipulation of materials, partly because his dealings with human beings are preponderantly with an army of employees rather than with equals who must be persuaded, not coerced.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“A king or despot can maintain his power if he is astute in internal politics and successful externally. If he is quasi-divine, his dynasty may be prolonged indefinitely. But the growth of civilisation puts an end to belief in his divinity; defeat in war is not always avoidable; and political astuteness cannot be an invariable attribute of monarchs. Therefore sooner or later, if there is no external conquest, there is revolution, and the monarchy is either abolished or shorn of its power.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“I come now to the question of forms of government, and it is natural to begin with absolute monarchy, as the oldest, simplest, and most widespread of the constitutions known in historical times.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“The desires of an individual can be collected into groups, each group constituting what some psychologists call a ‘sentiment’. There will be—to take politically important sentiments—love of home, of family, of country, love of power, love of enjoyment, and so on; there will also be sentiments of aversion, such as fear of pain, laziness, dislike of foreigners, hatred of alien creeds, and so on. A man's sentiments at any given moment are a complicated product of his nature, his past history, and his present circumstances. Each sentiment, in so far as it is one which many men can gratify cooperatively better than singly, will, given opportunity, generate one or more organisations designed for its gratification. Take, for example, family sentiment. This has given rise, or has helped to give rise, to organisations for housing, education, and life insurance, which are matters in which the interests of different families are in harmony.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“Many forces conspire to make for uniformity in modern communities—schools, newspapers, cinema, radio, drill, etc. Density of population has the same effect. The position of momentary equilibrium between the sentiment of independence and the love of power tends, therefore, under modern conditions, to shift further and further in the direction of power, thus facilitating the creation and success of totalitarian States.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“Love of independence is, in most cases, not an abstract dislike of external interference, but aversion from some one form of control which the government thinks desirable—prohibition, conscription, religious conformity, or what not. Sometimes such sentiments can be gradually overcome by propaganda and education, which can indefinitely weaken the desire for personal independence.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“The empires of Attila and Genghis Khan were transitory; and the nations of Europe lost most of their possessions in the New World. But with modern technique most empires are fairly safe except against external attack, and revolution is only to be expected after defeat in war.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“It is not only the absolute rapidity in the transmission of messages that is important, but also, and still more, the fact that messages travel faster than human beings. Until little over a hundred years ago, neither messages nor anything else could travel faster than a horse. A highwayman could escape to a neighbouring town, and reach it before the news of his crime. Nowadays, since news arrives first, escape is more difficult. In time of war all rapid means of communication are controlled by governments, and this greatly increases their power.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“All ancient empires suffered from revolts, often led by provincial governors; and even when no overt revolt occurred, local autonomy was almost unavoidable except when conquest was recent, and was apt, in the course of time, to develop into independence. No large State of antiquity was governed from the centre to nearly the same extent as is now customary; and the chief reason for this was lack of rapid mobility.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“The technique of acquiring dictatorship over what has been a democracy has been familiar since Greek times, and always involves the same mixture of bribery, propaganda and violence.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“Every organisation, whatever its character and whatever its purpose, involves some redistribution of power. There must be a government, which takes decisions in the name of the whole body, and has more power than the single members have, at any rate as regards the purposes for which the organisation exists.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“The more the methods of propaganda have been used to produce excitement, the greater will be the reaction, until in the end a quiet life comes to seem the only thing worth having. When, after a period of repose, the population again becomes capable of excitement, it will need a new stimulus, since all the old stimuli have become boring. Hence creeds which are used too intensively are transitory in their effects. In the thirteenth century, men's imaginations were dominated by three great men: the Pope, the Emperor, and the Sultan. The Emperor and the Sultan have disappeared, and the Pope's power is a pale shadow of what it was. In the sixteenth and early seventeeth centuries, the wars between Catholics and Protestants filled Europe, and all large-scale propaganda was in favour of one or other of the two creeds. Yet ultimate victory went to neither party, but, to those who thought the issues between them unimportant. Swift satirised the conflict in his wars of Big-Endians and Little-Endians; Voltaire's Huron, finding himself in prison with a Jansenist, thinks it equally silly of the government to demand his recantation and of him to refuse it. If the world, in the near future, becomes divided between Communists and Fascists, the final victory will go to neither, but to those who shrug their shoulders and say, like Candide, ‘cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin’. The ultimate limit to the power of creeds is set by boredom, weariness, and love of ease.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“It is impossible for technique to remain long progressive without science, or for science to flourish where there is no freedom of thought. Consequently insistence on doctrinal uniformity, even in matters quite remote from war, is ultimately fatal to military efficiency in a scientific age.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“Power over opinion, like all other forms of power, tends to coalescence and concentration, leading logically to a State monopoly. But even apart from war it would be rash to assume that a State monopoly of propaganda must make a government invulnerable. In the long run, those who possess the power are likely to become too flagrantly indifferent to the interests of the common man, as the Popes were in the time of Luther.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“If, in the name of Reason, you summon a man to alter his fundamental purposes—to pursue, say, the general happiness rather than his own power—you will fail, and you will deserve to fail, since Reason alone cannot determine the ends of life. And you will fail equally if you attack deep-seated prejudices while your argument is still open to question, or is so difficult that only men of science can see its force. But if you can prove, by evidence which is convincing to every sane man who takes the trouble to examine it, that you possess a means of facilitating the satisfaction of existing desires, you may hope, with a certain degree of confidence, that men will ultimately believe what you say. This, of course, involves the proviso that the existing desires which you can satisfy are those of men who have power or are capable of acquiring it.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“The principle that we ought to obey God rather than man has been interpreted by Christians in two different ways. God's commands may be conveyed to the individual conscience either directly, or indirectly through the medium of the Church.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“There are those who believe that almost any group of men, when once it has seized the machinery of the State, can, by means of propaganda, secure general acquiescence.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“Periods of naked power are usually brief. They end, as a rule, in one or other of three ways. The first is foreign conquest, as in the cases of Greece and Italy which we have already considered. The second is the establishment of a stable dictatorship, which soon becomes traditional; of this the most notable instance is the empire of Augustus, after the period of civil wars from Marius to the defeat of Antony. The third is the rise of a new religion, using the word in its widest sense. Of this, an obvious instance is the way in which Mohammed united the previously warring tribes of Arabia.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“Power is naked when its subjects respect it solely because it is power, and not for any other reason. Thus a form of power which has been traditional becomes naked as soon as the tradition ceases to be accepted. It follows that periods of free thought and vigorous criticism tend to develop into periods of naked power.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“Greek history is peculiar in the fact that, except in Sparta, the influence of tradition was extraordinarily weak in Greece; moreover there was almost no political morality.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis