Quotes About Power

Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power.

Rumors sound of galleries asking artists for upsized art and more of it. I've heard of photographers asked to print larger to increase the wall power and salability of their work. Everything winds up set to maximum in order to feed the beast.

All art is a kind of exorcism. This is what gives art its power to change the conditions of our life.

Dogs are the leaders of the planet. If you see two life forms, one of them's making a poop, the other one's carrying it for him, who would you assume is in charge.

The IRS! They're like the Mafia, they can take anything they want!

Dogs are the leaders of the planet. If you see two life forms, one of them's making a poop, the other one's carrying it for him, who would you assume is in charge.

And that's when I realized, when you're a kid you don't need a costume, you ARE superman.

I wonder which is the more useful to a nation, " he asked rhetorically, "a well-powdered nobleman who knows exactly at what minute the King gets up and goes to bed, and who gives himself grand airs while playing the part of a slave in some Minister's antechamber, or a business man who enriches his country, issues orders from his office to Surat or Cairo, and contributes to the well-being of the world.

Instead of doing away with the class war, we ought to intensify it, catch our enemy by the throat, because if we don't kill them in time, they'll put a knife in our backs.

An idea which needs rifles to survive dies of its own accord.

Men in packs can do terrible things, things they wouldn't have the hate to do alone. It's no excuse, just something you should know.

While their beneficence ensured no one they approved of ever went hungry, sick or homeless in Lilydale, they also used their influence to control the local population, harass those who stepped out of line and create a culture of fear that had neighbors telling on neighbors.

The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to justify imperialism and slavery. They're categories intended for the enforcement of power. They were never intended to be psychologically satisfying in the way we want them to be.

A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

The judges are doing what I am telling them to do, simply because I understand better than they do this one thing: the absurd lengths to which human beings go to prove themselves reasonable.

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

She would allow her hair to be loose, and she then would appear to me out of the corner of my eye as some blinding Valkyrie, some effulgent flood of a thing, beauty without no boundaries, burning at the edges of itself.

Muscles are the way the body obeys the mind.

It is so easy for humans to be cruel, and they leap to it. They love to do it. It is an exercise of all their laughable powers

Those who write the editorials and those who write the columns, they simply are unaccountable. They're free to impose their cultural politics in the name of freedom of the press.

In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.

On the political front, of course it's a zero-sum game. If it's all white males holding positions, you bring 10 women in, then it's, 'Women are coming!' Get 10 blacks and it's, 'Blacks are coming!' 'Hispanics are coming!' Zero-sum game. The seatmates might change but the chairs don't move. In the economy, the number of chairs can actually increase.

Oh yes, it exists, and the news media is always quick to highlight examples of anti-black racial hostility, but it is not the all-powerful, institutional beast so many say it is. But once people believe racism is their main problem, they become subject to that idea, and it prevents them from progressing.

Much of black leadership would rather deny racial progress than claim credit for it, apparently finding more political power in highlighting problems rather than in solving them.