Balance Of Power Quotes

“I see a world on the edge of a blade. Without balance, it will fall.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“The universe is all about balance. The forces of light and darkness are meant to keep a check on one another. If one becomes too powerful and starts overrunning the other, that balance will be upset. For the tyranny of virtue is as unbearable as the stranglehold of vice.”
― Shatrujeet Nath, The Guardians of the Halahala

“To keep any great nation up to a high standard of civilization there must be enough superior characters to hold the balance of power, but the very moment the balance of power gets into the hands of second-rate men and women, a decline of that nation is inevitable.”
― Christian D. Larson

“I dread this power he has over me. It makes me want to tell him all my secrets and see if he still wants me.”
― Amanda Bouchet, A Promise of Fire

“Russell observes that "the merits of democracy are negative: it does not ensure good government, but it prevents certain evils," such as the evil of a small group of individuals achieving a secure monopoly on political power. The chief peril for the politician, Russell insists, is love of power. And politicians can easily yield to the love of power on the pretense that they are pursuing some absolute good.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Love is the key to balance.”
― Soman Chainani, Rise of the School for Good and Evil

“Spare the conquered and confront the proud.”
― Winston Churchill, Churchill: The Power of Words: His Remarkable Life Recounted Through His Writings and Speeches

“When the means of great violence are widespread, nothing is more dangerous to the powerful than that they create outrage and injustice, for outrage and injustice will certainly ignite retaliation in kind.
— BuSab Manual”
― Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

“It was no accident that the beau ideal of his (John Adams') political philosophy was balance, since he projected onto the world the conflicting passions he felt inside himself and regarded government as the balancing mechanism that prevented those factions and furies from spending out of control.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“The State of the Union has become, under presidents of both parties, a political pep rally degrading to everyone. The judiciary and uniformed military should never attend. And Congress, by hosting a spectacle so monarchical in structure (which is why Thomas Jefferson sent his thoughts to Congress in writing) deepens the diminishment of the legislative branch as a mostly reactive servant of an overbearing executive.”
― George F. Will

“One thing was clear. I knew I wanted a relationship where there was no push-pull energy, the power struggles, the yanking back and forth. I wanted a relationship where the two energies, the two souls, simply danced, a beautiful dance… and loved.”
― Kristi Bowman, A Butterfly Life: 4 Keys to More Happiness, Better Health & Letting Your True Self Shine

“This almost miraculous performance was due to the working of the balance of power, which here produced a result which is normally foreign to it. By its nature that balance effects an entirely different result, namely, the survival of the power units involved; in fact, it merely postulates that three or more units capable of exerting power will always behave in such a way as to combine the power of the weaker units against any increase in power of the strongest. In the realm of universal history balance of power was concerned with states whose independence it served to maintain. But it attained this end only by continuous war between changing partners. The practice of the ancient Greek or the Northern Italian city-states was such an instance; wars between shifting groups of combatants maintained the independence of those states over long stretches of time. The action of the same principle safeguarded for over two hundred years the sovereignty of the states forming Europe at the time of the Treaty of Minster and Westphalia (1648). When, seventy-five years later, in the Treaty of Utrecht, the signatories declared their formal adherence to this principle, they thereby embodied it in a system, and thus established mutual guarantees of survival for the strong and the weak alike through the medium of war. The fact that in the nineteenth century the same mechanism resulted in peace rather than war is a problem to challenge the historian.

The entirely new factor, we submit, was the emergence of an acute peace interest. Traditionally, such an interest was regarded as outside the scope of the state system. Peace with its corollaries of crafts and arts ranked among the mere adornments of life. The Church might pray for peace as for a bountiful harvest, but in the realm of state action it would nevertheless advocate armed intervention; governments subordinated peace to security and sovereignty, that is, to intents that could not be achieved otherwise than by recourse to the ultimate means. Few things were regarded as more detrimental to a community than the existence of an organized peace interest in its midst. As late as the second half of the eighteenth century, J. J. Rousseau arraigned trades people for their lack of patriotism because they were suspected of preferring peace to liberty.
After 1815 the change is sudden and complete. The backwash of the French Revolution reinforced the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution in establishing peaceful business as a universal interest. Metternich proclaimed that what the people of Europe wanted was not liberty but peace. Gentz called patriots the new barbarians. Church and throne started out on the denationalization of Europe. Their arguments found support both in the ferocity of the recent popular forms of warfare and in the tremendously enhanced value of peace under the nascent economies.”
― Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

“Unless the sensual world subjugates the masculine and feminine, there can never be true balance between these two energies.”
― Lebo Grand

“Unless the sensual world subjugates the masculine and feminine, there can never be a true and harmonious balance between these two energies.”
― Lebo Grand

“Human beings have always danced delicately between love and power, wanting, on the one hand, to bond and belong and being willing and able to sacrifice themselves for others but, on the other hand, wanting to hold on to what they have, to exert power, control and dominate.”
― Tom Inglis, Love