We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished …

- Bertrand De Jouvenel

But there are no institutions on earth which enable each separate person to have a hand in the exercise of Power, for Power is command, and everyone …

- Bertrand De Jouvenel

For, once man is declared 'the measure of all things,' there is no longer a true, or a good, or a just, but only opinions of equal validity whose cla…

- Bertrand De Jouvenel

The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer t…

- Bertrand De Jouvenel

A people among whom custom is altogether sovereign endures the despotism of the dead.

- Bertrand De Jouvenel

Ransack the history of revolutions, and it will be found that every fall of a regime has been presaged by a defiance which went unpunished. It is as …

- Bertrand De Jouvenel

Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: We are our own Huns.

- Bertrand De Jouvenel

Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.

- Bertrand De Jouvenel

Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. …

- Bertrand De Jouvenel