In public life ... he had but one aim — his own aggrandisement.

Through symbolism based on killing animals, we encounter politically laden images of absorption, control, domain, and the necessity of violence. This message of male dominance is conveyed through meat eating—both in its symbolism and reality.

All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.

The cause of all this was the pursuit of power driven by greed and ambition, leading in turn to the passions of the party rivalries thus established. The dominant men on each side in the various cities employed fine-sounding terms, claiming espousal either of democratic rights for all or of a conservative aristocracy, but the public whose interests they professed to serve were in fact their ultimate prize

The real butches are straight … dealing with and controlling men makes you stronger.

Men gain their thrones by selling their daughters, or sending their sons to die.

Though blood be the best sauce for victory, yet must it not be more than the meat.

He inclined his head ever so slightly, displaying with his bearing the supreme confidence, even arrogance, that is the sole providence of cats, dragons, and certain highborn women.

Kings have always boasted that their slightest wishes were commands. The classic proof of their power and their success was their command of limitless amounts of food and drink, limitless quantities of clothes and jewels: the services of innumerable slaves, servants, and officials: limitless sensual stimulations, and not least, limitless opportunities for sexual intercourse, for even here erotic delight was measured in gross quantitative terms. The affluence that once was monopolized by the king and his court is now being held up as the ultimate gift of the power system to mankind at large.

There are proven ways to win the loyalty of tough, strong, ferocious men: play on the certain knowledge of their superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering.

There is always the right of the strong to take the weak and the rich to take the poor and the powerful to take those who have no power. UrLeyn may have written down our laws and changed a few of them, but the laws that still bind us to the animals cut the deepest. Men compete for power, they strut and parade and they impress their fellows with their possessions and they take the women they can. None of that has changed. They may use weapons other than their hands and teeth, they may use other men and they may express their dominance in money, not other symbols of power and glamour, but...

The Communists had gained power and a vast increase of membership partly by appealing to the middle classes against the revolutionaries, but partly also because they were the only people who looked capable of winning the war. -- Chap. 5

For hand in glove with that power was an insatiate greed; they were one and the same.

He was... a womanizer, he wanted to be in the sack with everybody.