Quotes About Power

When she spoke, entire planets hushed to hear her words. People she had never heard of, and never -would- hear of, committed suicide at the thought that they were unworthy to share the universe with her. Obscure alien races knelt at her image and spit up, with appropriate ritual obeisance, offerings of the very best regurgitated fish-liver wine.

Porn mainlined to the forebrain, electric orgasms courtesy of induction, screaming synthetic highs circuited to the mind, technicolor power fantasies jabbed right into one's primal need.

It's the same as the city, Sarah knows, the same hierarchy of power, beginning with the blocs in the orbits and ending with people who might as well be the fieldmice in front of the blades of the harvester, pointless, countless lives in the path of a structure that can't be stopped. She feels the anger coiling around her like armor. The chance to rest, she thinks, was nice enough while it lasted. But right now another fragment of time must be survived.

power becomes a slave to passion so easily, and to an unacknowledged passion easiest of all.

The atom was split by persistence.

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurancesand the economy of effort it brings.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.

Successful ... politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.

The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.

If you ignore what a man desires, and you deny the very source of his power.

The established leaders of any organization have great natural advantages. They are believed to have better sources of information. The books and papers are in their offices. They took part in the important conferences. They met the important people. They have responsibility. It is, therefore, easier for them to secure attention and to speak in a convincing tone. But also they have a very great deal of control over the access to the facts. Every official is in some degree a censor.

Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible.

The public must be put in its place [...] so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.

We have learned to call this propaganda. A group of men, who can prevent independent access to the event, arrange the news of it to suit their purpose. That the purpose was in this case patriotic does not affect the argument at all. They used their power to make the Allied publics see affairs as they desired them to be seen. The

Bücher erschaffen kannst du noch nicht", sagte der Schattenkönig, "aber umbringen kannst du sie schon. Bist du sicher, daß du nicht lieber Kritiker werden möchtest?

In tiefen, kalten, hohlen Räumen, Wo Schatten sich mit Schatten paaren, Wo alte Bücher Träume träumen, Von Zeiten, als sie Bäume waren, Wo Kohle Diamant gebiert, Man weder Licht noch Gnade kennt, Dort ist's, wo jener Geist regiert, Den man den Schattenkönig nennt.

Die Neugier ist die mächtigste Antriebskraft im Universum, weil sie die beiden größten Bremskräfte im Universum überwinden kann: die Vernunft und die Angst.

That's how powerful you are, girl...You pretty, but pretty alone is not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that's like a mirror. Men and women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can't bear to see you go.

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him," my father had told me more than once. "A businessman has business books and a dream has novels and books of poetry. Most women like reading about love, and a true revolutionary will have books about the minutiae of overthrowing the oppressor. A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.

Librarians are wonderful people, partly because they are, on the whole, unaware of how dangerous knowledge is. Karl Marx upended the political landscape of the twentieth century sitting at a library table. Still, modern librarians are more afraid of ingnorance than they are of the potential devastation that knowledge can bring. (p. 192)

The law," he continued, "is made by the rich people so that the poor people can't get ahead...

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

For whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.

Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.