Quotes About Power

High cognitive friction polarizes people into two groups. It either makes them feel frustrated and stupid for failing, or giddy with power at overcoming the extreme difficulty. These powerful emotions force people into being either an "apologist" or a "survivor." They either adopt cognitive friction as a lifestyle, or they go underground and accept it as a necessary evil. The polarization is growing acute.

When your number one job is serving the needs of users, and some external force tries to divert your efforts to some other goal, your number one job now changes to removing that external force. It doesn't matter if that external force has more economic or political power than you do. Your job is clear.

To deliver both power and pleasure to users, interaction designers think first conceptually, then in terms of behavior, and last in terms of interface.

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what it is you want to hear.

A four-year-old may believe that her thoughts also have the power to affect what happens to others, and so she will feel guilty should misfortune befall someone about whom she has had an angry thought.

And so I have grown up wanting to feel secure when it comes to money, but doing so by treating it as something to be enjoyed, shared, and not given power.

We all learn in school that the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government must check and balance each other. But other non state institutions must participate in this important system of checks and balances as well. These checking institutions include the academy, the media, religious institutions and NGOs.

Jesus, the world's a slaughterhouse. Really it is. If you're weak they're going to cut your throat—ask the Armenians, ask the Jews. The bad people want it their way, my friend. And how badly they want it is the study of a lifetime.

What was Trotsky's quote? "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

on chess] He had learned the moves, back in Vidin, from Levitzky the tailor, who called it "the Russian game." Thus, the old man pointed out, the weak were sacrificed. The castles, fortresses, were obvious and basic; the bishops moved obliquely; the knights—an officer class—sought power in devious ways; the queen, second-in-command, was pure aggression; and the king, heart of it all, a helpless target, dependent totally on his forces for survival.

Wisdom wins where might fails.

Nephew, there ain't a man alive that can stand up ta the power of that little cooter. The holt it has on a man is unbreakable. It'll bring a strong man ta his knees. Read your history. Look at the kings an' kingdoms that have fallen ta that little split tail. Prentice Ritter

Maybe Horst really believed all that "might makes right" malarkey. Maybe he didn't like an Irish boy showing up the German "master race." Or maybe he was just a bleeding maggot.

Because that's what Nazi Germany was: the bully who found your most painful wound and poked at it with a stick.

They lined the men up against a wall in the assembly yard. Rat-tat-tat-tat! The watch officer gunned them down himself, riddling their bodies with bullets.

That's what a bully is," his dad said. "Somebody who pushes people around and never gets in trouble for it.

The James Hills and J.P. Morgans are an affront to a society dedicated to the worship of mediocrity.

When we talk today about receptiveness to stories, we tend to contrast that attitude to one governed by reason - we talk about freeing ourselves from the shackles of the rational mind and that sort of thing - but no belief was more central to Lewis's mind than the belief that it is eminently, fully rational to be responsive to the enchanting power of stories.

A large armored knight exoskeleton

At its heart, socialism is about the creation of a new society, built from the bottom up, through the struggles of ordinary working people against exploitation, oppression, and injustice—one that eliminates profit and power as the prime goals of life, and instead organizes our world around the principles of equality, democracy, and freedom.

People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.

Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse."

People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.