Quotes About Power

dirk, stunning the man. Borric shoved the third bruiser hard into a fat merchant

Sve je magija. Samo ograni?enja onoga ko se njome služi uslovljavaju koji ?e se put slediti.

Kroldech isn't fit to command fleas attacking a dog.

Quando tutto si tace così, alto come qua, tutto porta al cuore. O più ancora verso gli organi copulatori. Oh, musica eterea delle sfere! Oh, potenza erotica delle semicrome cosmiche obliterate dalla tendenza gravitazionale e fatale del mondo verso il niente!

Your job, your home, your relationships, your very life - and your death - all, and more, are managed, controlled and directed by the law.

she was an army of one and was stronger than the invading force.

The guardians of the just state should be the most underprivileged of all its citizens. It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

As Plato: It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

Women's liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful.

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become a story-teller.

Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.

But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch—even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie.

We tend to treat violence and the abuse of power as though they fit into airtight categories: harassment, intimidation, threat, battery, rape, murder. But I realize now that what I was saying is: it's a slippery slope. That's why we need to address that slope, rather than compartmentalizing the varieties of misogyny and dealing with each separately. Doing so has meant fragmenting the picture, seeing the parts, not the whole.

One more thing about Cassandra: in the most famous version of the myth, the disbelief with which her prophecies were met was the result of a curse placed on her by Apollo when she refused to have sex with the god. The idea that loss of credibility is tied to asserting rights over your own body was there all along. But with the real-life Cassandras among us, we can lift the curse by making up our own minds about who to believe and why.

Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they've always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it's compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.

Men's bodies are weapons and women's bodies are targets and queer bodies are hated for blurring the distinction or rejecting the metaphors.

We are all the heroes of our own stories, and on of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather that be told by them.

Of course false-rape allegations have happened. My friend Astra Taylor points out that the most dramatic examples in this country were when white men falsely accused Black men of assaulting white women. Which means that if you want to be indignant on the subject, you'll need to summon up a more complicated picture of how power, blame, and mendacity actually work. ("Feminism: The Men Arrive")

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter," says an African proverb. But what if the lionesses write eloquently but the editors prefer the hunters' version?

The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the story of the memory loses its power. Over time you become someone else. Only when the honey turns to dust are you free.

the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

So much of feminism has been women speaking up about hitherto unacknowledged experiences, and so much of antifeminism has been men telling them these things didn't happen. You were not just raped, your rapist may say, and then if you persist there may be death threats, because killing people is the easy way to be the only voice in the room.

We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep.

Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society.