Friedrich Nietzsche on power

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

A few hours of mountain climbing turn a villain and a saint into two rather equal creature. Exhaustion is the shortest way to equality and fraternity, and liberty is added eventually by sleep.

What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Carl Jung1875–1961The Psychology of the Unconscious (1943), P. 97

• Love

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

George Orwell1903–1950Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: “The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.” In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

Bertrand Russell1872–1970Education and the Social Order (1932), p. 31

• History