Quotes About Power

How could an alphabet—letters that didn't even mean anything by themselves—be important? But it was important. Our stories, our names, our alphabet. Even Uncle's newspaper. It was all about words. If words weren't important, they wouldn't try so hard to take them away.

It was all about words. If words weren't important, they wouldn't try so hard to take them away.

Power was always with the others, with the death-dealers and those who had obediently evolved the tunnel vision it takes to organize atrocity. The room was already iced in nuclear winter.

Emperors came and went while bureaucracy continued, as rampant as mould.

Even men who use fear as their weapon can themselves be threatened. We all have something we don't want to lose.

I laughed. 'Claudius Laeta means, Faustus, the Emperor's choice should be steered by his freedmen. Government by secretariat. Democracy through bureaucracy.

Olympus, of course not! If you are to be a politician, your natural medium is lying. Surely your agent has explained that?

Latin, the language of politicians, provides a fine medium for lies, malpractice, obfuscation and straight bamboozling. It's perfect for buffoons, inadequates and crooks.

Rumours would do. When you blacken someone's name in politics, hearsay can be freely deployed. Scandal needs to be colourful, not true.

Only the rich can stand for office.

But, remember, a tyrant hates to admit he is one," Faustus said quietly. "The worse he is, the more he claims—and even believes—that

any henchman who thinks himself the equal of his superior is dangerous.

it also follows that the oppressed can't criticize the powerful. The only remedy, so far as I can see, for what threatens to be a strongly conservative upshot, is to accept an overt double standard: allow a questionable idea to be criticized if it is held by those in a position of power-Christian creationism, for example-hut not if it is held by those whom the powerful oppress-Zuni creationism, for example.

It is no less astonishing how many subjects—historical, philological, biological, sociological, economic—people regard as politics

After all, they said, the French Fascists now in power had identical interests with the Germans. Les loups ne se mangent pas entre eux—wolf does not eat wolf. Hitler's government and Laval's government were playing into each other's hands.

while America, for its part, proved singularly unreceptive to the socialist-realist principle that undergirds them all: the principle that art can, or even must, have a message; and that such art-with-a-message, which will always be dismissed as propaganda, is in fact the only available corrective to the real and actual propaganda of entrenched official power.

There is nothing the rabble fears more than intelligence. If they understood what is truly terrifying, they would fear ignorance.

words of the reckless pierce like swords,             but the tongue of the wise brings healing. (Proverbs 12:18, NIV)

The realm of the unseen holds your secret hero identity. Being a hero is an act of worship. Heroes

We do not live by the violence of a sword, but the time has come to live by the power of one.

I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.

The power of the croisé, or the cross, comes from leverage. When executed with proper form and employed without hesitation, the opponent runs upon your blade. This is not a move that requires a heavy hand; in fact, it is best done with the gentlest of touches.

The saber we've been entrusted to bear is not lifted with our hands; it is raised by our words.

I don't need to roar, for I hold the power of the whisper. I don't have to be black or white ... for I am the color and beauty of creation!