Quotes About Power

IX. THE PRICE OF DISASTER The price of the disaster of slavery and civil war was the necessity of quickly assimilating into American democracy a mass of ignorant laborers in whose hands alone for the moment lay the power of preserving the ideals of popular government; of overthrowing a slave economy and establishing upon it an industry primarily for the profit of the workers. It was this price which in the end America refused to pay and today suffers for that refusal.

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne;

the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission.

Golden apples are beautiful–I remember the lawless days of boyhood, when orchards in crimson and gold tempted me over fence and field–and, too, the merchant who has dethroned the planter is no despicable parvenu.

There are many, many exceptions, but, in general, it is true that there is scarcely a bishop in Christendom, a priest in the church, a president, a governor, mayor, or legislator in the United States, a college professor or public school teacher who does not in the end stand by War and Ignorance as the main method for the settlement of our pressing human problems. And this despite the fact that they may deny it with their mouths every day.

III. THE PLANTER How seven per cent of a section within a nation ruled five million white people and four million black people and sought to make agriculture equal to industry through the rule of property without yielding political power or education to labor.

with growing exploitation, until they fought slavery to save democracy and then lost democracy in a new and vaster slavery.

By straining his political power to the utmost, the Negro got a public school system and got it because that was one clear object which he understood and which no bribery or chicanery could seduce him from advocating and insisting upon season in and out.

The World War was primarily the jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races.

Away with the black man's ballot, by force or fraud

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve someone's slavery. They do not want equality because the thrill of their happiness comes from having things that others have not.

The new organization of northern wealth was not comparable to the petty bourgeoisie which seized power after the overthrow of European feudalism. It was a new rule of associated and federated monarchs and finance wielding a vaster and more despotic power than European kings and nobles ever held. It was destined to subdue not only simply Southern agrarianism but even individual wealth and brains in the North which were creating a new petty bourgeoisie of small merchants and skilled artisans.

Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyes toward the Sea. And the world whistled in his ears.

Racism is not just hatred. Racism is a system. A system that dehumanizes humans in order to keep them down and, most often, to make money off of them. -- Adam Gidwitz, The Inheritance

With pulleys and ropes and time to plan one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldn't anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time.

It is difficult for gods to walk the earth without taking the forms of beasts.

A dying king, said Sir Thomas More, is apt to be wiser than a healthy king.

A thought is a substance, producing the thing that is imagined by the thought.

Do all the work you can do, every day, and do each piece of work in a perfectly successful manner; put the power of success, and the purpose to get rich, into everything that you do.

Audry Hepburn on the cover of The Nun's Story was staring up at me from my unmade bed. Her hair was hidden by her snow-white wimple; her big eyes looked frightened. What are you looking at? I said. Fuck you. It was the first time I'd ever said the word. I felt a brief shiver of power. Then I sat back on the bed and sobbed. Dolores Price: Lady of Sorrow.

And in taking on the subject of themselves-making themselves vulnerable to the unseen reader-they have exchanged powerlessness for for the power that comes with self-awareness.

why would white dudes want to change things when they held all the cards?

La lingua non ha ossa, ma rompe il dorsol... The tongue has no bones but can break a man's back!