"To be vested with enormous authority is..." - Quote by Mark Twain
To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have the on-looking world consent to it is finer.
More by Mark Twain
“They say that you can't live by bread alone, but I can live on compliments.”
“What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. . . . The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. . . . When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world.”
“The house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been at work.”
More on Authority
“One precedent in favor of power is stronger than a hundred against it.”
“If I am to constrain you by any law, it must be one by which I am also bound.”
“I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.”
More on Power
“What I have done up to this is nothing. I am only at the beginning of the course I must run. Do you imagine that I triumph in Italy in order to aggrandise the pack of lawyers who form the Directory, and men like Carnot and Barras? What an idea!”
“You don't reason with intellectuals. You shoot them.”
“Public Opinion... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.”