Quotes About Power

Government is tyranny. At its best it is dressed in pretty colours.

A King must win. The rest is dust.

Any man can do what he likes. Right, Splitfoot?' 'Right, Chief.' 'Just as long as it's exactly what I fucking tell 'em to do.

There can be a greater power in words than in all the steel within the Circle of the World.

You want to be merciful. To stand in the light. I understand it. I admire it. But, my queen...Only the victors can be merciful.

Jezal swallowed and hunched his shoulders, watching the chunks of long dead wood file slowly past like rows of tombstones. "I don't like this," he muttered under his breath. "You think I do?" Bayaz frowned grimly over at him. "You think any of us do? Men must sometimes do what they do not like if they are to be remembered. It is through struggle, not ease, that fame and honor are won. It is through conflict, not peace, that wealth and power are gained.

Why?' she hissed. Why indeed? 'I give you orders,' he barked, 'not fucking reasons!

Words are weapons. They should be handled with proper care.

In violent times folk like to kneel to violent men. In peaceful times they remember they're happier standing.

She was not a woman to be deterred by hatred: not from her workers, not from her rivals, not from the men she bullied, bribed or blackmailed to get her way. It is when they truly hate you, after all, that you know you have won. So she met the seething dislike with effortless superiority, paraded past with her shoulders back and chin high. If she was to be cast as the villain, so be it. They were always the most interesting characters anyway.

If you could kill a man by frowning at his back, the Breaker of Swords would have fallen bloody through the Last Door that day, but a frown is no blade, and Thorn's hatred cut no one but her.

I'm just one person. But you are one. One plus the Lord can do mighty things now and again.

Did is a word of achievement, Won't is a word of retreat, Might is a word of bereavement, Can't is a word of defeat, Ought is a word of duty, Try is a word each hour, Will is a word of beauty, Can is a word of power.

Exceptionalism" is a shared self-description of imperial forms and . . . every empire imagines itself an exception.

What has long made the U.S. military base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean a "secret history," or the nuclear test sites that have ravaged large swaths of reservation land in the United States a "Native American problem," or consigned the Mariana Islands as outside the field of (post)colonial work? Why have these not been considered nodal points of an imperial history rather than grist for the case that the U.S. remains an imperial exception?

One task is to identify what for some time I have referred to as the "epistemic politics" that often sever colonial pasts from their contemporary translations

ask explicitly how the "slow violence" of imperial formations is dislodged from the politics of its making and renamed.

see the interview done by Valentine Daniel for Public Culture (24, no. 3 [Fall 2012]: 487–508).

colonial entailments do not have a life of their own. They wrap around contemporary problems; adhere in the logics of governance; are plaited through racialized distinctions; and hold tight to the less tangible emotional economies of humiliations, indignities, and resentments

Colonial counterinsurgency policies rest undiluted in current security measures. Molten in their form, colonial entailments may lose their visible and identifiable presence in the vocabulary, conceptual grammar, and idioms of current concerns. It is the effort of this venture to halt in the face of these processes of occlusion and submersion, to ask about how they work, their differential effects; and on whom they most palpably act.

An excursion through the politics of conceptual labor is the meat of the chapters that follow. The political effects and practices that imperial formations impose and induce are its marrow.

thinking otherwise is to inhabit them differently, to envision how to recast the resilient impingements and damages to which imperial forms give rise.

the "imperial dispositions of disregard": that which makes it possible—sometimes effortlessly and sometimes with strenuous if unremarked labor—to look away.

a focus on the "supremacy of reason" as the master trope of colonial critique has displaced the enduring affective work that such rationalities perform.