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

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

Men Order Passion
The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

Below Great Man Masses Top
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 to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

Government Matter Power
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 into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

Art Invasion Slavery
The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man’s natural endowment, get full play there.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

Construction Genius Order Passion
Sooner or later, a society of sheep must create a government of wolves.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

Government Later Sheep Sooner
But there are no institutions on earth which enable each separate person to have a hand in the exercise of Power.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

Exercise Hands Running
Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: We are our own Huns.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

Barbarian Huns Invasion
It is appropriate here to recall that the so-called Dark Ages began with the flight of the individuals into the protection of lords or chapters and came to an end when the individual again found it to his advantage to set forth on his own.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

Age Chapter Dark Flight Protection
For Power is command, and everyone cannot command. Sovereignty of the people is, therefore, nothing but a fiction, and one which must in the long run prove destructive of individual liberties.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

Destructive Liberties Power
We live at a time when everything conspires to push the individual into the fold.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

Conspire Individual Live
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

Democracy Pattern Shapes
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 true today as it was ten thousand years ago that a Power from which the magic virtue has gone out, falls.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

Fall Magic Power Virtue Years
A people among whom custom is altogether sovereign endures the despotism of the dead.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

Despotism People Sovereign

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

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

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