Quotes About Power

Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.

All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.

The power of readers lies not in their ability to gather information, in their ordering and cataloguing capability, but in their gift to interpret, associate and transform their reading.

Every time we put something into words, we simultaneously pronounce a declaration fo faith in the power of language to re-create and communicate our experience of the world, and our admission of its shortcomings to name this experience fully... All our libraries are the glorious record of that failure.

But who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?

Desde siempre, el poder del lector ha suscitado toda clase de temores (...)temor al lector individual que puede, a partir de un texto, redefinir el universo y rebelarse contra sus injusticias.

Pero no sólo los gobiernos totalitarios le temen a la lectura. En los patios de las escuelas y en los vestuarios de los clubes deportivos se intimida a los lectores tanto como en los despachos gubernamentales y en las prisiones.

Every day, somewhere in the world, someone attempts (sometimes successfully) to stifle a book... And again and again, empires fall and literature continues.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power....

When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when the sea flows in our veins...and the stars are our jewels, when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure?

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feel that I've got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.

But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly–they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say 'no' to the boss. But a man cannot say 'no' to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favour has been withdrawn.

This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country´s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of W. Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by few.

I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that I vented it on thoughts, rather than people. Conquering an unknown province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come apart. Bullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a dictator without any risks and responsibilities.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.