["Seize the top and you will have the middle." --Greek aphorism].

[King Antigonus to Zeno the philosopher:] "As is the ruler, such for the most part may it be expected the subjects will become." Diogenis Laertius, Zeno.

". . . employing speech as his only instrument, molding and adapting some things and softening and smoothing off those which are hindrances to his work, such as would be knots in wood or flaws in iron, is an ornament to the city. For this reason the government in Pericles' time was 'in name,' as Thucydides says, 'a democracy, but in fact the rule by the foremost man,' because of his power of speech."--Plutarch, Precepts of Statecraft.

"Even in ordinary life there are many who do not find it easy to make decisions, and the number of those prepared to take the initiative is small in comparison to the obedient and submissive mass. . . . [leadership] is creating a spirit of confidence in those under him. . . . The man of character then draws to himself the hopes and wills of everyone as the magnet draws iron . . . . There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt. All religions have their holy of holies, and no man is a hero to his valet. . . . nothing more enhances authority than silence. For in addition to everything else, the leader who keeps himself perforce, in isolation from his fellows, turns his back upon those simpler pleasures which are the gift of unconstraint, familiar intercourse, and even, friendship." --Charles de Gaulle, The Edge of the Sword.

". . . it happens, I do not know why, that the educated are less tractable than the ignorant. Thus for the ordinary run of abbots, in our own day, there is nothing more objectionable than that their monks should penetrate at all deeply into good learning. They would rather rule over sheep than men, and the only reason for this preference is that it is easier." Erasmus, The Antibarbarians.

"He who administers, governs, because he infixes his own mark and stamps his own character on all public affairs as they pass through his hands; and, therefore, so long as the English aristocracy administers the commonwealth, it still governs it."--Matthew Arnold

[from a list of discoveries while working in Washington:] ". . . .2. The federal government is run by Congress, especially by the House of Representatives, which controls the budget and decides how much money will be spent, who will receive it, and what they may or may not spend it on. 3. Those who work inside the Beltway in Washington D.C. believe that they are smarter than everyone outside the Beltway because they have the power to write the laws and regulations that everyone else in the country has to obey. 4. There is one way to achieve eternal life: Become a federal program. . . 8 Federal programs work best when distributing money based on need, because it is easy to measure . . . Federal programs work worst when any judgment about their quality or effectiveness is required, because politics gets in the way." Diane Ravitch, A Scholar in Washington.

[on a tract called "Homo Politicus"] "I have read it, and find it to be the most pernicious work which man could devise or invent. Rank and riches are the author's highest good; he adorns his doctrine accordingly, and shows the means to acquire them; to wit, by inwardly rejecting religion, and outwardly professing what best serves his own advancement, also by keeping faith with no one, except in so far as he is profited thereby. For the rest, to feign, to make promises and break them, to lie, to swear falsely, and many the like practices call forth his highest praises." Spinoza, letter to I.

The King:

"The harlot's cheek, beautied with plast'ring art
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word.
O heavy burden!"

--William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

"'If one must needs do wrong, far best it were/ to do it for a kingdom's sake'-- and 'Achieve the just man's good repute, but deeds/ That fit the knave.' [citing a lost fragment of Ixion]--wicked and fallacious sentiments, but fitting respectively for Eteocles, Ixion, and an old userer. If then we remind our sons that authors write them, not because they commend or approve them, but with the idea of investing mean and unnatural characters and persons with mean and unnatural sentiments, they could not be harmed by opinions of poets." Plutarch, How To Study Poetry.

"Executions, banishments and confiscations I did not employ even against the former conspirators, although a man must bring himself to take such measures in the beginning of a reign more than at any other time." --Lucian, Phalaris.

"[Frost] had died twice, Jerry decided. Once to make him talk and once to shut him up. The things they had done to him first were all over his body, in big and small patches, the way fire hits a carpet, eats holes, then suddenly gives up. Then there was the thing round his neck, a different, faster death altogether. . . . 'Poor devil didn't know enough, did he?' Connie mused . . . 'Frost had nothing to betray, darling,' she explained. 'That's the worst that can happen to anyone. What could he give them? . . . [s]o of course they went on. And on.' She turned to Smiley's direction. He was the only one who shared so much history with her. 'We used to make it a rule-- remember George-- when the boys went in? We always gave them something they could confess.' John le Carré, The Honorable Schoolboy.

"Over the years we refined our techniques of persuading people to work for us and came to recognize that it was unwise to try to persuade potential agents to sign on the dotted line. Many of those prepared for whatever reason to deal with a hostile intelligence service, will shy away from a formal commitment and actually prefer an ambiguous relationship. I advised my officers: if you think the answer is going to be no, don't ask the question." Markus Wolf, Man Without A Face--The Autobiography Of Communism's Greatest Spymaster

The ghost:

--William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

" . . . Pericles himself was very careful of what and how he was to speak, insomuch that, whenever he went up to the hustings, he prayed the gods that no one word might slip unawares from him unsuitable to the matter and the occasion." Plutarch, Pericles.

"In medicine, as in politics, candor can kill." Lee Atwater [who died of a brain tumor]

"Society soon civilizes the unpolished; a life of business makes the most open circumspect." Goethe, Introduction to the Propylaea.

Perhaps it is not possible both to act wisely and also to write wisely about conduct because action needs will power, which no book can teach; or else because the wisest men of all are those who never give away their secrets." Gilbert Highet

[Heraclitus' book on Nature dealing with the universe, politics, and theology--] "he deposited in the temple of Artemis and, according to some, he deliberately made it the more obscure in order that none but adepts should approach it, and lest familiarity should breed contempt." Diogenes Laertius, Heraclitus.

". . . together with some of the chief points treated of in metaphysics, which I had formerly dictated to a youth, to whom I did not wish to teach my opinions openly." Spinoza, letter to Oldenburg.

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." --Oscar Wilde.

"With us even he still communicates in some sort of mask, or muffler: and, we have reason to think, under a feigned name!" --footnote to page 9 of the Macmillan Company Modern Readers' Series edition of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, reprinting the essay Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Werken by Professor Diogenes Teufeldrockh.

"And to these may be added the private correspondence of individuals; and the less guarded in these, because not meant for the public eye, not restrained by the respect due to that; but poured forth from the overflowings of the heart into the bosum of a friend, as the momentary easement of our feeling. . . . I wish never to put pen to paper; and the more because of the treacherous practice some people have of publishing one's letters without leave. " Thomas Jefferson letters to John Adams.

"I had the honor of writing you on the 21st of June but the letter being full of treason has waited a private conveyence." Jefferson to Abigail Adams

"I received yesterday your favor of the 7th. This was 4. days later than Mr. Short's of the same date. It had evidently been opened. We must therefore consider both governments as possessed of its contents." Jefferson to John Adams[italicised portions in cipher].

"To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines." Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

--Anonymous

"[E]xperience in the last war has demonstrated that most ciphers and codes are broken within their practical working life, and that the only unbreakable system has been shown to be the one-time random pad . . . The absence of any predictable aspect in the key undermines such standard analytical tools as same key encryption matchups, frequency counts of letters, or searches for familiar words and typical opening and closing phrases." --R.A. Haldane, The Hidden World

"Vartan Gregorian, the president of Brown University, who was one of the first academic leaders to speak out against political correctness, said today that he and his colleagues are so preoccupied with fund raising that they fear offending virtually any faction. 'It's not natural for me, but I have to speak with tact and diplomacy,' he said. 'I have come to agree with Lord Chesterfield that wisdom is like carrying a watch. Unless asked, you don't have to tell everybody what time it is.'" --New York Times, Sunday, July 24, 1994.

"Nobody naturally likes a mind quicker than their own and one more capable of getting its operation into words. It is practically something to conceal. The history of men's minds has been of concealing them, until men cry out for intelligence, and the thing has to be brought into use." --F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to Andrew Turnbull August 8, 1933.

"Be wiser than other people if you can, but do not tell them so. . . . Every man is not ambitious, or covetous, or passionate; but every man has pride enough in his composition to feel and resent the least slight and contempt. Remember, therefore, most carefully to conceal your contempt, however just, wherever you would not make an implacable enemy." Earl of Chesterfield, Letters and Maxims of Lord Chesterfield.

Dusenberg Driver's Manual explanation for why the manufacturer's name does not appear on the car itself: "The superlatively fine has no need to be boastful."

"Even the most trivial thing becomes interesting--if only you keep it a secret." --Oscar Wilde

--Brady Earnhart

". . . a secret properly communicated only to those who are to be concerned in the thing in question, will probably be kept by them, though they should be a good many. Little secrets are commonly told again, but great ones generally kept." --Earl of Chesterfield, Letters and Maxims of Lord Chesterfield.

". . . a careful reading of the press could often produce results far superior to secret reports of agents. . . . . almost all the reams of paper produced by NATO and stamped with the codes 'cosmic' or 'top secret' are, when you get right down to it, not even worth using as toilet paper . . . By 1956, the conflict between the superpowers had become rather like Bertolt Bercht's depiction of the Thirty Years' war in his play Mother Courage: it had taken on its own momentum. On both sides, the arms industry, the politicians, and the intelligence services lived well from the flourishing business." Markus Wolf, Man Without A Face--The Autobiography Of Communism's Greatest Spymaster

"Good men were leaving the [CIA] in ever greater numbers. And good men entering were rare. Long before the Cold War ended and Aldrich Ames went to prison, the clandestine service was falling apart. The unforgiving law of bureaucratic rot: first-class people may choose first class, but second chooses third, choose chooses fourth--had come brutally into play in the CIA's closed society. . . . When the American embassy was taken over in 1979, not a single Agency officer in Tehran spoke Persian. Almost all their sources had spoken English, a few French." Edward Shirley [former CIA spook]

"Carleton Coons, an OSS operative implicated in the assasination of Admiral Darlan, French high commissioner of Algiers, argued for a power elite to quell disutrbances worldwide via political assasination in a paper to William Donovan. The killings would be orchestrated by 'a class of individuals [who] must have the task of thwarting mistakes, diagnosing areas of potential world disequilibrium, and nipping the causes of potential disturbance in the bud. There must be a body of men whose task is to throw out the rotten apples as soon as the first spot of decay appear.' Coons cited the example of Hitler and his disciples in 1933: a wise police action would have been to 'have killed this group.' Donovan did not circulate this proposal." --Anthony Cave Brown, Wild Bill Donovan, The Last Hero.

"Chairman Mao: The trade between our two countries at present is very pitiful. It is gradually increasing. You know China is a very poor country. We don't have much. What we have in excess is women. (laughter)

Dr. Kissinger: There are no quotas for those or tariffs.

Chairman Mao: So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands.

Prime Minister Zhou: Of course, on a voluntary basis.

Chairman Mao: Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burden. (laughter)

--Declassified Transcripts: Henry Kissinger in China 

"How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key, wherewith we decipher the whole man!" Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.

"Laugh and the world laughs with you is very good advice for most people, though not for a Chief of Protocol. He must laugh and cry alone. . . In my two years of service [as Chief of Protocol] we received seventy heads of state or government, roughly half the world's leaders. Looking back I realize that the process by which men come to power, and retain it, whether in a royal line, election, or coup, generally equip them with a certain perspective, a kind of patience, a tolerance for departures from the 'best laid plans,' and a sense of the ridiculous." James W. Symington, The Stately Game

--William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94