Quotes About Power

POLITICS (noun): Poly, meaning "many" plus Tics, meaning "blood-sucking parasites." —Larry Hardiman "I believe that any politician who comes to power, in part, through his skill in debate and public speeches, who is agile in handling questions at news conferences, with a glistening TV or radio image, has the conversational talents to be a natural liar." —Paul Ekman, Telling Lies

After all, kill one man and you're considered a murderer. Wipe out all life on an entire planet, with the exception of the occupants of a wooden ark, and you're considered a god.

It's been said that history is told by the victors.

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." —J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb upon seeing the first test detonation

Politics, noun: [Poly 'many' + tics 'blood-sucking parasites']

Hitler believed that the bigger the lie, the more audacious, the more likely it was to be believed. Because who'd imagine someone would have the nerve to spread such a colossal lie? And the more such a lie was repeated, the more likely it would be accepted as truth.

The scholarly term is Intermittent Variable Rewards. Which simply means that unpredictability has great power to addict. Because we have an innate evolutionary compulsion to know.

We hang the petty thieves. The master thieves we appoint to public office.

In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, I speak to you spirits and I command you to LEAVE!

Because it lacks the rigors of critical thought, it naïvely embraces big technology; because it celebrates numbers it naïvely courts power; because it rejects nuance and knows next to nothing of the dialectical and dialogical character of truth, it naïvely courts the tyranny of religious ideology and cant.

Vyrai dešimt kart? patrauklesni, kai tiktai klausosi.

Money. The trickiest substance in life--as it's the way we keep score, measure our worth, and think we can control our destinies. Money: the essential lie.

Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -­ kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor ­- with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons.

Give me ten thousand Filipino soldiers and I will conquer the world.

The requirement that authority must equal responsibility is not only impossible to fulfill; it is logically unnecessary except within a system which makes authority the exclusive means of influence. The

Just as Marxism was meant to free the labourer and share the wealth around, so in this new version of an old claim, the power of the patriarchal white males must be taken away and shared around more fairly with the relevant minority groups.

Klein similarly explained that when Jeong uses the term 'white people' in her 'jokes' it does not mean what it says. As Klein put it, 'On social justice Twitter, the term means something closer to "the dominant power structure and culture" than it does to actual white people.

McIntosh urges people to 'raise our daily consciousness' on the nature of privilege and attempt to use 'our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader basis'. This suggests that McIntosh is not against power, just in favour of some redistribution of it along different lines.

From Michel Foucault these thinkers absorbed their idea of society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions that have evolved over time, but always in the unforgiving light cast when everything is viewed solely through the prism of 'power'. Viewing all human interactions in this light distorts, rather than clarifies, presenting a dishonest interpretation of our lives. Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love.

It began to behave – in victory – as its opponents once did. When the boot was on the other foot something ugly happened.

Perhaps nothing was done to reverse the trend because no one in power believed anything could be done. If this was a political truth then it remained wholly unmentionable. Nobody could get elected on such a platform, and so a continent-wide tradition arose of politicians saying things and making promises that they knew to be unachievable.