Quotes About Power

Chirren is the most dangerous creatures on the earth, with the exception of young girls between the ages of fifteen and forty-two.

Let me speak to your boss I said. Six magic words that roil deep in the bowels of anymore collecting a paycheck on a biweekly basis. It's like winking at a leprechaun: he has to give up his pot of gold, and yet no one knows why.

Freedom for us has always been dangerous. Freedom for us has been a crime as far back as our oldest memories. And so whenever we're feeling liberation we know that there's somebody nearby with a rope and a collar, a shotgun and a curse.

I think that the power over death and life is the greatest strength that any person can have. It trumps sex and wealth. If I'm willing to die no one can master me.

You have made Commerce a god that weighs on humanity like a twenty-four-pound boil on a man's back (117-118)

They want to hold on to you and your people. They have isolated the ones who might grow powerful and overthrow their debauched reign.

The person who controls history controls their fate. The man who can tell you what happened, or did not happen, is lord and master of all he surveys.

I don't give a fuck what you're trying to do or what you want. I'd send your ass away if you were a white man with a red ribbon tied around your dick.

We will be one step down from the Creator, she said, her olive-hued face tightening into an expression that she considered dramatic. Imagining a world and then making it.

My heart was beating like it was being played by a one-armed Japanese Ondekoza drummer pounding slowly on his seven-hundred-pound drum with a caveman's club at twilight.

But Socco, Mustafa Ali said. If there ain't no black people really and they ain't no white people then how come you still usin' them words? Because them words still usin' me, brother Ali. They usin' me like a mothahfuckah.

The law is a flexible thing—on both sides of the line—influenced by circumstance, character, and, of course, wealth or lack of same.

The problem with people like Antoinette, people who have only partly comprehended that race is no longer the primary defining factor of American life, is that they, her and her kind, unknowingly keep watch over the masters' wealth; and that the power of that wealth maintains all the ignorance of centuries of classism, racism, and the hierarchy that ignorance demands.

The most dangerous people in the world were men like Desmond Bell. They became SS officers and postmasters; church deacons and cops. In their minds there was always a marching band playing the tune that they stepped to.

Our shadow leaders, like some evil wizards of oz, give out grants and grammy's, oscars and lines of tenure, and magically our revolutionary thinkers become grousing members of the establishment.

You don't have to be smart to be tough-minded. As a matter of fact, the combination of stupidity and silence might be the greatest weapon in the history of our species.

Somewhere along the way I had developed the feeling that I wasn't going to outlive the adventure I was having. There was no way out but to run, and I couldn't run, so I decided to milk all those white people for all the money they'd let go of. Money bought everything. Money paid the rent and fed the kitty. Money was why Coretta was dead and why DeWitt Albright was going to kill me. I got the idea, somehow, that if I got enough money then maybe I could buy my own life back.

No. What I wonder is why would you care?" "I'm a cop, LT. It's my job to protect the welfare of even garbage like you.

Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large," my host said formally. He sat in the swivel chair and leaned back. "What does that mean exactly?" "What do you think it means?" "That you plan to overthrow the government in hopes of causing a perpetual state of chaos throughout the world?" "They aren't much on reality at Xavier or Columbia, are they?

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion," Lincoln lectured Herndon, "and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

If the government was ever to be destroyed, Polk concluded, it would be by "the alluring and corrupting influence of executive patronage.

If economic power is centered outside national African boundaries, then political and military power in any real sense is also centered outside until, and unless, the masses of peasants and workers are mobilized to offer an alternative to the system of sham political independence.

This is typical, trying to treat history as though it is the property of the ruling class, which will dispense however much of it they want to dispense at any given point in time.

The essence of white power is that it is exercised over black peoples - whether or not [black peoples] are minority of majority, whether it was a country belonging originally to whites or to blacks. It is exercised in such a way that black people have no share in that power and are, therefore, denied any say in their own destinies.