Men exercise only the power that they are allowed to exercise by other men, whom, when their clothes are off, they much resemble; so that the strong are rarely as powerful as they are thought by the weak, or the weak as powerless as they are thought by themselves. Its ultimate seat is—to use an unfashionable word—the soul. It rests on hope and fear, the belief of those who submit to it that its agents can confer upon them benefits, from food to spiritual peace, and inflict evils, from hunger to misery of mind… To destroy it, nothing more is required than to be indifferent to its threats, and to prefer other goods to those which it promises. Nothing less, however, is required also.

-R. H. Tawney