A Quote by Joseph de Maistre
All grandeur, all power, and all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
The moment you come to trust chaos, you see God clearly. Chaos is divine order, versus human order. Change is divine order, versus human order. When the chaos becomes safety to you, then you know you're seeing God clearly.
Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos, and you know the thing about chaos? It's fair.
The bond of family blesses us with an immeasurable power. But we also must accept what comes with it. It gives us a responsibility to love without condition, without apology. We can never waver from the power of that bond, even if it's tested. The bond nourishes us, gives us strength. Without that power, we are nothing.
Chaos does not unify. Chaos only serves the most extreme elements of society that seek to destabilize any semblance of order to fulfill their selfish lust for power.
There is a great difference, then, between "power" and "authority." Power refers to one's ability to coerce others (through physical, economic, or other means) to do one's bidding. One can possess the means of power: physical strength, armaments, and money. But authority must be performed. Authority refers to one's ability to gain the trust and willing obedience of others. While power rests on intimidation, authority survives through inspiration.
If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of separation?
The human mind and the entire life process is chaotic. Chaos is not something that lacks order; chaos has varieties of order within it.
The sorcery and charm of imagination, and the power it gives to the individual to transform his world into a new world of order and delight, makes it one of the most treasured of all human capacities.
God has ordained the state as a delegated authority; it is not autonomous. The state is to be an agent of justice, to restrain evil by punishing the wrongdoer, and to protect the good in society. When it does the reverse, it has no proper authority. It is then a usurped authority and as such it becomes lawless and is tyranny.
Even if things look very precise and very organized, chaos is always there. But I like the moment of chaos to be at the beginning. I cannot deal with the chaos at the end.
Horror serves a cathartic role in human society, all throughout the world. It is a way of confronting the darkness, both within and without.
Just take one thing out and the whole palace, the whole edifice of the human mind collapses. Take effort out of it and desiring disappears, imagination disappears, past and future disappear, or take desire out and effort disappears and time disappears and ego disappears. Just take one thing out of the gestalt and the whole gestalt simply disappears; it cannot exist without certain things. Those are the very essentials of it - effort is one of the essentials. Hence all the great Masters of the world have taught about grace.
This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.
Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.
When women start to bond over their sexuality, it's very similar to the way that men bond over their sexuality in sports. Men bond over their sexual prowess - their strength, their agility, their power. Women bond over their undulation, their curves, their sensuality - things that are innately feminine. Once you do that, there is no turning back.
All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.
Related Authors
Alva Myrdal Quotes
Swedish
Diplomat
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Quotes
French
Diplomat
Dag Hammarskjold Quotes
Swedish
Diplomat
Daniel Fried Quotes
American
Diplomat
Greig Fraser Quotes
Australian
Diplomat
Hans Blix Quotes
Swedish
Diplomat
James Bryce Quotes
English
Diplomat
Jean Kennedy Smith Quotes
American
Diplomat
Jeane Kirkpatrick Quotes
American
Diplomat
Lawrence Eagleburger Quotes
American
Diplomat
Madeleine M. Kunin Quotes
American
Diplomat
Miroslav Lajcak Quotes
Slovak
Diplomat
Nizar Qabbani Quotes
Syrian
Diplomat
Richard Grenell Quotes
American
Diplomat
Richard N. Haass Quotes
American
Diplomat
Sergei Lavrov Quotes
Russian
Diplomat