Quotes About Power

When the Bolsheviks, came to power in 1917, Jews were able to take government jobs for the first time – hence the connection, in the minds of peasants whose first sight of a Jew in a position of authority was a commissar come to requisition grain or conscript men for the Red Army, between Jewishness and the nastier aspects of communism.

Unlike other dictators, Stalin and his satraps never made the mistake of believing themselves beloved -- on the contrary they saw plots under every stone.

Trading posts turned into forts, forts into tribute-collecting points, and tribute-collecting points, by the end of the tenth century, into the largest kingdom in Europe, stretching from the Baltic to the Carpathians.

And all the time they threatened me with everything they could possibly threaten me with. All that was lacking was hellfire. They really wanted to make me think they were the Last Judgment. But they are not the slightest bit all-knowing. All they know is what you tell them.

Wenn ein noch so winziger Streich gelang gegen die Allmacht des Feindes, dann war schon alles gelungen.

Since the same ruthless fist that had suppressed justice had also suppressed a few useless old customs,

For the first time since the escape Fahrenberg realized that he wasn't pursuing one single man whose features he knew, whose strength was exhaustible, but rather a faceless, inexhaustible, inestimable power. But he couldn't bear to think such a thought for longer than a few minutes.

Während die Starken sich ruhig einmal irren können, ohne etwas zu verlieren, weil selbst die mächtigsten Menschen noch Menschen sind - ja sogar ihre Irrtümer machen sie nur noch menschlicher -, darf sich, wer sich als Allmacht aufspielt, niemals irren, weil es entweder Allmacht ist oder gar nichts.

But there were also other voices among the powerful in Westhofen. They thought the current state of affairs there was unbearable. Fahrenberg had to be dismissed as soon as possible, and with him also the clique he had brought with him or had gathered about him. It was not that those who felt this way wanted to see an end of the hell and a beginning of justice at Westhofen. Rather, they wanted there to be order even in hell.

Wir fühlten alle, wie tief und furchtbar die äußeren Mächten in den Mensch hineingreifen können, bis in sein Innerstes, aber wir fühlten auch, dass es im Innersten etwas gab, was unangreifbar war und unverletzbar.

There are . . . well, always have been, people in positions of power and influence who will bend and use the law to suit themselves, for their own gain. Those are the kind of wrongs we try to expose. And without being too dramatic, that's what drives us as journalists . .

successful city trader. Which in some ways he was, when you came to think of it. The markets went up, they went down, and if you were smart you could control whichever way they moved. Winner takes all. It didn't matter whether you were a trader shifting shares in oil, or a gangster moving cocaine or heroin. The stakes were as high for both, and those with the biggest balls never, ever lost.

It's like something out of the Krays.

Every master loves to fuck a slave. It is a law of nature, or maybe culture.

Butler [Judith Butler] elaborates Foucault's argument about the operations of power and resistance in order to demonstrate the ways in which marginalised identities are complicit with those identificatory regimes they seek to counter

the power men everywhere wield over women . . . has become a model for every other form of exploitation and illegal control' [Adrienne Rich]

Law and Justice took over the state public broadcaster—also in violation of the constitution—firing popular presenters and experienced reporters. Their replacements, recruited from the far-right extremes of the online media, began running straightforward ruling-party propaganda, sprinkled with easily disprovable lies, at taxpayers' expense.

the worst kind of one-party state "invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

When people have rejected aristocracy, no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth, no longer assume that the ruling class is endorsed by God, the argument about who gets to rule—who is the elite—is never over.

he is a man who wants the power and fame that he feels he has been unjustly denied.

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.

Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to the face of Imperialist warmongers.

This form of soft dictatorship does not require mass violence to stay in power. Instead, it relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies. These modern-day clercs understand their role, which is to defend the leaders, however dishonest their statements, however great their corruption, and however disastrous their impact on ordinary people and institutions. In exchange, they know that they will be rewarded and advanced.

This way of speaking—"Putin is a killer, but so are we all"—mirrors Putin's own propaganda, which often states, in so many words, "Okay, Russia is corrupt, but so is everyone else.