Power goes to two poles-to those who’ve got the money and those who’ve got the people.
The prerequisite for an ideology is possession of a basic truth.
A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises.
Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you are free to live.
The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.
One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.
A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Never do for someone what they can do for themselves.
It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral;.
Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.
One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.
In his Social Contract, Rousseau noted the obvious, that “Law is a very good thing for men with property and a very bad thing for men without property.
Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society. If one were to project the democratic way of life in the form of a musical score, its major theme would be the harmony of dissonance.
People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others.
Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.
Mark Twain once put it, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” Power.
If one wants to act, the dilemma is how and where; there is no “when?” with time running out, the time is obviously now.
One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as ‘that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.’ If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.
Mendoza said to Tanner, “I am a brigand; I live by robbing the rich.” Tanner replied, “I am a gentleman; I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands.” The.