top of page
.png){kind=small}
Exlpore more Power quotes
"A stone thrown up into the air is bound to fall down, and absolute power is like a huge stone thrown up into the air."
"Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught."
"It is easy, out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, 'I couldn't help it; the way was set.' But think of the glory of the choice!"
"Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up."
"Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible."
Explore more quotes by Lionel Trilling
"The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather."
"This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking."
"We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian."
"Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere."
"Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process."
"It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it."
"There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination."
bottom of page