Echoes through time: A man's power

“A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face.  It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”

Thomas Cromwell (1485 – 1540), as characterised in Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall

(Yes, I know it’s cheating but it was such a great passage.)