If you want power, fame is a liability.
Ruling
In ’37 Stalin made a hash
Of party loyalists and army brass.
Decimation: One in ten are shot.
What’s the word when one in ten are not?
A man can bear almost any punishment, provided it’s not for his own good.
One never sees extremely powerful men decide, in midlife, that they have accumulated enough power, and devote the rest of their years to giving it away.
Ants can be deterred from crossing a boundary by outlining it with chalk: this is respectable opinion. On ants it works only for a while.
We know that something will be with us forever when war is declared on it.
An underclass is what you get when stupid people practice modern mores.
If you rebel against the powers that be, and win, assuming power, it is necessary, to continue your program of rebellion, to pretend to remain out of power; and this is in fact what we observe.
Every place becomes less attractive when it stops excluding the riff-raff, and in a democracy not excluding the riff-raff is a bedrock principle.
Most laws, and indeed most rules, exist to remind you who’s in charge.
What makes an established religion? The power to punish blasphemy.