Siddartha

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“We have become so used to thinking of domestic politics in terms of party politics that we are inclined to forget that the conflict between [the party system and the council system] has always been a conflict between parliament, the source and seat of power of the party system, and the people, who have surrendered their power to their representatives.”
― Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

tags: democracy, politics

4 likes

“Science, knowledge, logic and brilliance might be useful tools but they didn’t build highways or civil service systems. Power built highways and civil service systems. Power was what dreams needed, not power in the hand of the dreamer himself necessarily but power put behind the dreamer’s dream by the man who it to put there, power that he termed “executive support”.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

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“The Cheka, precursor of the OGPU, NKVD, KGB and today’s FSB, had absolute supralegal power over life and death. ‘In that case why should we bother with a People’s”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin

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“Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.”
― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

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“I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.”
― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

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