Quotes About Power

Surely the mindset of those who think they need to win, to dominate, to punish, to reign supreme must be terrible and far from free, and giving up this unachievable pursuit would be liberatory.

Imperialism [...] also meant that the conquerors themselves regarded and instructed their imperial subjects to regard the colonized countries as the outskirts rather than the center of the world.

Only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together

When I think back to why I was apolitical into my mid-twenties I see that being politically engaged means having a sense of your own power--that what you do matters--and a sense of belonging, things that came to me only later and that do not come to all.

Pero los hombres que explican cosas aún asumen que soy, en una obscena metáfora fecundadora, un recipiente vacío que debe ser rellenado con su sabiduría y conocimiento.

Language is power. When you turn "torture" into "enhanced interrogation," or murdered children into "collateral damage," you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care. But it works both ways. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

Too, the elite often believe that if they themselves are not in control, the situation is out of control, and in their fear take repressive measures that become secondary disasters.

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind. 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 to become the storyteller.

a man who controls some part of the fate of the world apparently devoted his energies to generating fear, misery, and injustice around him says something about the shape of our world and the values of the nations and institutions that tolerated his behavior and that of men like him.

sexual assault. If that term confuses you take out the word "sexual" and just focus on "assault," on violence

Jeszcze jedno w kwestii Kasandry: niewiara, z jakÄ… spotykaÅ'y siÄ™ jej proroctwa, byÅ'a skutkiem klÄ…twy, którÄ… rzuciÅ' na niÄ… Apollo za to, ?e nie chciaÅ'a uprawia? z nim seksu. W tej historii od poczÄ…tku chodzi o to, ?e tracisz wiarygodno??, kiedy domagasz siÄ™ prawa do wÅ'asnego ciaÅ'a.

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.

Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist.

David Morris, in The Evil Hours, his remarkable book on trauma, notes, "Part of trauma's corrosive power lies in its ability to destroy narrative, and . . . stories, written and spoken, have tremendous healing power for both the teller and the listener.

Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.

think we would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic violence separately from rape and murder and harassment and intimidation, online and at home and in the workplace and in the streets; seen together, the pattern is clear).

Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her, and he thought he could take her without asking and without consequences

Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate.

I find now that most people forget the immense work done around race and gender and sexuality and prisons and power, and that it was, in fact, work—intellectual labor to reject the assumptions built into language, the forces that lift some of us up and push others down, to understand and describe the past and the present and propose new possibilities for the future.

To believe him, you'd have to buy the line that Diallo took one look at his potbellied, 60-something naked body fresh out of the shower and just volunteered to go down on her knees.

this administration has been in effect a slow-motion coup, in how it gained power and how it exercises power, violating the rule of law and the standards of the office a little and then a little more and a little more, profiting and wrecking as they go

It's a system of control. It's why so many intimate-partner murders are of women who dared to break up with those partners.

That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social misery to violent silencing and violent death (and I think we would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic violence separately from rape and murder and harassment and intimidation, online and at home and in the workplace and in the streets; seen together, the pattern is clear).

A study of rape in Asia drew alarming conclusions about its widespread nature but also introduced the term "sexual entitlement" to explain why so much of it takes place. The report's author, Dr. Emma Fulu, said, "They believed they had the right to have sex with the woman regardless of consent." In other words she had no rights. Where'd they learn that? Feminism