power

Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure.

People want to feel they deserve their good fortune. The receipt of a favor can become oppressive: It means you have been chosen because you are a friend, not necessarily because you are deserving. There is almost a touch of condescension in the act of hiring friends that secretly afflicts them.

The friend is rarely the one who is most able to help you; and in the end, skill and competence are far more important than friendly feelings.

A sharply defined enemy is a far stronger argument for your side than all the words you could possibly put together.

A helpful or apparently honest gesture, or one that implies the other person's superiority—these are perfect diversionary devices.

a person who cannot control his words shows that he cannot control himself, and is unworthy of respect.

But the human tongue is a beast that few can master. It strains constantly to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will run wild and cause you grief. Power cannot accrue to those who squander their treasure of words.

Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener. Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519

they will go home and ponder your every word.

As a young man, the artist Andy Warhol had the revelation that it was generally impossible to get people to do what you wanted them to do by talking to them. They would turn against you, subvert your wishes, disobey you out of sheer perversity. He once told a friend, "I learned that you actually have more power when you shut up."

Learn the lesson: Once the words are out, you cannot take them back. Keep them under control. Be particularly careful with sarcasm: The momentary satisfaction you gain with your biting words will be outweighed by the price you pay.

A solid reputation increases your presence and exaggerates your strengths without your having to spend much energy. It can also create an aura around you that will instill respect, even fear.

Make your reputation simple and base it on one sterling quality. This single quality—efficiency, say, or seductiveness—becomes a kind of calling card that announces your presence and places others under a spell.

Since we must live in society and must depend on the opinions of others, there is nothing to be gained by neglecting your reputation. By not caring how you are perceived, you let others decide this for you. Be the master of your fate, and also of your reputation.

Court controversy, even scandal. It is better to be attacked, even slandered, than ignored. All professions are ruled by this law, and all professionals must have a bit of the showman about them.

People feel superior to the person whose actions they can predict. If you show them who is in control by playing against their expectations, you both gain their respect and tighten your hold on their fleeting attention.

Every now and then, act in a way that does not mesh with other people's perception of you.

Never argue. In society nothing must be discussed; give only results. (Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881)

Never associate with those who share your defects—they will reinforce everything that holds you back. Only create associations with positive affinities. Make this a rule of life and you will benefit more than from all the therapy in the world.

even the most powerful person is locked inside needs of his own, and that if you make no appeal to his self-interest, he merely sees you as desperate or, at best, a waste of time.

Self-interest is the lever that will move people. Once you make them see how you can in some way meet their needs or advance their cause, their resistance to your requests for help will magically fall away.

He knew Xavier Maclachlan had picked up on some of what the Luddites were arguing for. The Luddites had attracted a broad band of the younger generations who responded to a core anti-science message with, it seemed to Hadamard, their guts, not their heads. And that gut response was what Maclachlan was tapping into.

As soon as Maclachlan lifted his hand from the Bible, U.S. peace-keeping troops in the Balkans and Africa started to board their planes to leave. Foreign aid stopped. The U.N. was being thrown out of New York, and there was a rumor that Maclachlan was planning some military adventure to take back the canal from Panama. Army engineers set in place during the handover from the last Administration started to build a wall, two thousand miles of it, along the Mexican border, to exclude illegal immigrants. While it was being built, troops brought home from peacekeeping abroad were operating a shoot-to-kill policy. There was chaos in the financial markets. Maclachlan had withdrawn the U.S. from the North American Free Trade treaty, from the World Trade Organization, from GATT. Reviews of the country's membership of the World Bank and the IMF had started—arms of an incipient world government, Maclachlan said, designed to let in the Russians. He had raised tariffs—ten percent against Japan, fifty percent against the Chinese—and world trade collapsed. The Chinese, particularly, screamed. And so Maclachlan sent the Seventh Fleet to a new station just off the coast of Taiwan. Meanwhile all the strategic arms treaties with Russia were torn up, as Maclachlan ordered his technicians to dig out the blueprints for Reagan's old dream of SDI. In fact, Maclachlan wanted to go further. He was inviting ideas for what he called his "da Vinci brains trust." The press was full of schemes for fantastic new weapons: smart remote sensors; dream mines that could shoot at passing traffic; smart armor that would use explosive tiles to deflect incoming projectiles; maybe even an electrical battlefield in which electricity-propelled shells would be zapped in by low-flying aircraft. And back home, Maclachlan had cut off any remaining programs which benefited blacks and other minorities, and any funding that appeared to support abortion, which had been made illegal in any form. Xavier Maclachlan was a busy man, and he was fulfilling his campaign promises.

I'd made the error of admitting that I didn't know exactly where it was. Inside the concent it was fine to admit ignorance, because that was the first step on the road to truth. Out here, it just gave people like Crade an opening to seize power.

You know, that might be the answer-to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail."

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

I'm suspicious of a disinterested interest.

'Gratitude' is a euphemism for resentment.

the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth—then shut up.

"These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I'm a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don't happen in places like Blacksmith."

Daylight knew that in the hotels, Riesling, not quite so good even, was charged for at from a dollar and a half to two dollars a quart. And she got twenty-two cents a gallon. That was the game. She was one of the stupid lowly, she and her people before her—the ones that did the work, drove their oxen across the Plains, cleared and broke the virgin land, toiled all days and all hours, paid their taxes, and sent their sons and grandsons out to fight and die for the flag that gave them such ample protection that they were able to sell their wine for twenty-two cents. The same wine was served to him at the St. Francis for two dollars a quart, or eight dollars a short gallon. That was it.

"Dear Lord—never put me in the charge of a frightened human being."

"Violence," came the retort, "is the last refuge of the incompetent.

You're what they call a man of peace, aren't you?" "I suppose I am. At least, I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct."

'Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.'

For it is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works, and that such curses as that of Aporat's are really deadly.

I must remark of my sister, what is equally true of all the violent women I have ever seen, that passion was no excuse for her, because it is undeniable that instead of lapsing into passion, she consciously and deliberately took extraordinary pains to force herself into it, and became blindly furious by regular stages;

"Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy.

enabling the Nazis to use their war against drugs to feed into a surveillance state quite soon after they came to power.

Just like the old dealer's trick: the first dose is free.

"Let us not bandy philosophical nonsense. Every question can be boiled down to the one: 'Why is there anything?' Every religious, business and governmental question has the single derivative: 'Who will exercise the power?' Alliances, combines, complexes, they all chase mirages unless they go for the power. All else is nonsense, as most thinking beings come to realize."