“The man who declares his will a force of nature only confesses his terror before the deeper, more chaotic will of the world, which he seeks to command as a child commands the sea.”

“Democratic nations, having dismantled the old aristocracies, now vest absolute authority in the temporary executive, who mistakes the roar of the majority for a mandate to rupture the world's arteries.”

“War is the father of all, and the price of passage is the tension that holds commerce together until it breaks.”

“The blockade that seeks to establish sovereignty merely demonstrates how sovereignty itself depends on the free flow it now claims to exclude.”

“That same concentrated interest which clamors for public protection of its trade will, the moment it gains power, sacrifice the general opulence to its own petty policy.”

“When a single magistrate, without consultation of the Senate or consent of the allies, presumes to seize the lifeline of nations, he confuses imperium with piracy.”

“No nation that mortgages its financial stability to the caprice of a single magistrate's pronouncement can expect credit, save at the usurer's rate.”

“To strangle the world's energy at a single, archaic chokepoint proves a bankruptcy of imagination, a failure to see the system of wireless transmission already latent in nature.”

“'Markets react to decisive leadership' - the sentence that performs the crime, dressing the seizure of a global artery in the syntax of corporate reassurance.”

“One must admire the efficiency of a system that can, with a single pleasant announcement, arrange for every household on earth to pay more for its light and heat.”

“They speak of national interest while my children's breath grows costly, proving again that the freedom of the powerful is measured by the bondage of the many.”

“Power never concedes the commons without a demand, and today the demand is written in the rising numbers that tax every kitchen and farm for a quarrel they did not make.”

“We have always paid for the iron house with our own warmth, never questioning why the architect alone holds the key to the furnace.”

“Watch the price of bread follow the admiral's decree, a lesson in political economy written not in the treatise, but in the housekeeper's ledger.”

“Record the date, the pronouncement, and the subsequent price for fuel in every district, and you will have a ledger of power's true constituency.”