Quotes About Power

seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything.

That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social misery to violent silencing and violent death

The premise was that people were sheep, except when they were wolves, and the solution was to find out how best to herd them. But the sociologists would stand all this on its head.

Protector was one face of their power, but destroyer was still the other face. And neither one put your fate in their hands. They protected what was theirs, to protect or destroy and sometimes the plot was about his grief that he'd failed to protect or his revenge against other men and sometimes he'd destroyed her himself. And the story was still about him.

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.

We are still in an era of battles over who will be granted the right to speak and the right to be believed

wealth and power are also often disasters, with casualties and wreckage. Maybe what often gets called wealth in booms should mostly be imagined as impoverishment of the majority who don't become wealthy and often become displaced or priced out locally, served up with the collateral damage from the concentration of power, resources, and the control of place.

In the 1980s we imagined apocalypse because it was easier than the strange complicated futures that money, power, and technology would impose, intricate futures hard to exit. In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.

The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.

violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness —from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis.

Sometimes birds return to their cages when the door is open, sometimes people free to make their own choices choose to abandon that power.

Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even.

R]apists tend to lie, a lot...

We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one 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 than be told by them.

As for that incident in my city, similar things happen all the time. Many versions of it happened to me when I was younger, sometimes involving death threats and often involving torrents of obscenities: a man approaches a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will likely be rebuffed.  The fury and desire come in a package, all twisted together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos, love into death, sometimes literally.

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. But we are free together or slaves together

People would ask the question, 'How do we keep these very powerful men from being so abusive. And I was like, 'I don't think we're going to stop them from being so abusive, so let's stop them from being so powerful.

Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence.

Perhaps it's not that knowledge is power, but that some knowledge has power and some is stripped of the power it deserves. The powerful lack the knowledge; the knowledge lacks the power.

the ocean is my mother.

I will be­lieve that the bat­tle of fem­i­nism is over, and that the fe­male has reached a po­si­tion of equal­ity with the male, when I hear that a coun­try has al­lowed it­self to be turned up­side-down and led to the brink of war by its pas­sion for a to­tally bald woman writer.

I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy.

This cancellation of process in government leaves it an empty violence that must perpetually and at any cost outdo itself, for it has no alternative idea and hence no alternative activity