Principles of Power, and Politics

Despising (Coriolanus)
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere. (1608),William Shakespeare 1564-1616


I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it (1907), Voltaire, 1694-1778

If one must serve, I hold it better to serve a well bred lion, who is naturally stronger than I am than two hundred rats of my own breed.
(Voltaire, Tocqueville The Ancient Regime 1856)

In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. if you want anything done, ask a woman. (Margaret Thatcher 1925, British Conservative Prime Minister)

Pennies dont fall from heaven. they have to be earned on earth. (Margaret Thatcher)


There is something that governments care far more for than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy...I say to the government, you have not dared to take the leaders of Ulster for their incitement to rebellion. Take me if you dare.
Emmeline Pankhurst 1858-1928 - English suffragette leader, founder of the women's social and political Union 1903


When the people contend for their liberty, they seldom get anything by their victory but new masters. (Lord Hallifax 1633-1695, English politician and essayist)

Of all I had only honour and life have been spared. (in a letter on 1525
Francis I , king of france 1494-1547)


Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Rosa Luxemburg 1871-1919


The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. (in Polemic May 1946; George Orwell, 1903-1950 English Novelist)


Power is not a means it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safguard a revolution, one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. (George Orwell, 1949)

Women - one half the human race at least - care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.(The English constitution, 1867 The Monarchy) Walterh Bagehot 1826-1877


Sarah Hogg, 1946-
So much of cabinet consists of reporting, rather than debating, congratulating, rather than arguing
(on leaving the prime minister's policy unit 1995)

Winston Churchill, 1874-1965
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.(speech at Harvard, 1943)

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies. (March 1943)

Beatrice Webb, 1858-1943
I never visualised labour as separate men and women of different sorts and kinds... labour was an abstraction, which seemed to denote an arithmetically calculable mass of human beings, each individual a repetition of the other.

Simeon Strunsky, 1879-1948
people who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on buses and in the subway.


Elizabeth I, 1533-1603, Queen of England and Ireland
I will have here but one Mistress, and no Master.
Reproving the presumption of the Earl of Leicester Rober Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia (1641)


Nietzsche's philosophy thoughts on the female of the species: "When a woman has scholarly inclinations, there is usually something wrong with her sexually." "Woman has so much reason for shame; so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmarmishness, petty presumption, petty licentiousness, and immodesty lies concealed in woman." "Everything about woman has one solution: that is pregnancy."

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), one of the seminal modern philosophers and a forefather of existentialism, seems to have had unsuccessful personal life. He was a lifelong but apparently unwilling bachelor. He made two marriage proposals that we know about, both of which were disappointing.

In 1876, when he was 32, he proposed to Mathilde Trampedach, a self-assured 21-year-old. It's a measure of Nietzsche's cluelessness that he proposed to Mathilde mere days after meeting her and he sent his letter in the care of her boyfriend, conductor Hugo von Senger, whom she later married. Having been rejected, Nietzsche wrote Mathilde an apology, perhaps sensing his mistake.

Six years later similar story happened with Lou Salome, a Russian-German writer who apparently turned the heads of quite a few male intellectuals in her day. This time he sent his proposal by way of philosopher Paul Ree, who had already proposed to Lou himself. Lou later married a professor.