Quotes About Power

If you want to stop the war machine, you'll have to go after the money machine.

What man's mind can create, man's character can control.

We have had a close shave, I can tell you. If the French had landed in force, if the peasants throughout the country had rallied to them. The Irish must be taught a lesson. London will expect that. We are schoolmasters as well, you see. Scullery maids and hangmen and schoolmasters. The lessons taught by armies are hard ones.

A system more ingeniously contrived, first for the debasement, and then for the continuance in that debasement, of an entire people cannot easily be imagined.

I have the greatest respect for General Buonaparte, as every soldier must. But he will make out of Egypt a catastrophe for France. The Revolution has but one enemy, England. And the place to strike England is close to her home.

The man who conquered Ireland could be a match for the man who did not conquer Egypt.

There is much to dislike about President Obama's approach to the financial crisis. But opposition, it seems, will have to come from somewhere other than conservatism. The party out of power is also a party out of touch.

Money has transformed every watchdog, every independent authority. Medical doctors are increasingly gulled by the lobbying of pharmaceutical salesmen.

It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject - whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber - to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.

Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital, the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense.

Every free-trade agreement we have signed in recent years has been designed to make cities vulnerable in precisely this way. If you're a medium-sized city like Wichita, hosting some giant multinational's plant is less of an achievement today than it is a gun pointed at your head, a constant reminder that some executive has the power to turn your town into an instant Flint

attempts to maintain aristocratic entitlement through "mystification and concealment," as an 1835 newspaper put it.

Or is it the other way around—are they supposed to serve us? Let us resolve to ask that far-reaching question again: For whom does America exist? This time around, there can be only one possible answer.

backlash leaders systematically downplay the politics of economics. The movement's basic premise is that culture outweighs economics

No, it is intellectuals who call the shots, people with graduate degrees and careers in government, academia, law, and the professions.

Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Anti-populism is always about the powerful lording it over the weak; the credentialed and the high-born reminding the world that the definitions of goodness and justice and truth are whatever they determine.

conservatism's populist myth.

Although the Cons vituperate against the high and the mighty, the policies they help enact—deregulating, privatizing—only serve to make the Mods higher and mightier still. And while it may hurt the Mods' feelings to overhear their secretaries referring to them as RINOs, the many rounds of tax cuts the Cons have accomplished have surely made the sting subside. The Mods win even when they lose.

the people at the top know what they have to do to stay there, and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.

Anger is one of the sinews of the soul.

Money is the sinew of love as well as war.

Why biblical texts? Because biblical texts have the power to release what Brueggemann calls a "counter-imagination," a way of seeing the world that is an alternative to the consumerist, militaristic, death-obsessed imagination of the culture.

Iron sleet of arrowy showerHurtles in the darken'd air.