Quotes About Power

Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches...

Anything under God's control is never out of control.

Augustine [of Hippo] knew the power and the danger of idolatry and celebrity. And he knew the danger of both was first to permit the idolater to offload the duty of thinking onto their idol. And second to seduce the celebrity, in turn, into thinking his fans have nothing insightful to say. That treatment of a fellow human, a fellow christian, would be not the achievement of theology but the avoidance of it. And he went out of his way in his life and in his words to forestall such approaches.

Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms. They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law for justice.

dominant groups tend to entrench their hegemony by inculcating an image of inferiority in the subjugated.

The notion developed that the breach of reason with nature was a necessary one; that man had to make it in order to develop his powers of reason and abstraction. Schiller makes this point in his Letters on the Aestethic education of Man, as does Hölderin in his Hyperion Fragment. The belief was that the human destiny was to return to nature at a higher level, having made a synthesis of reason and desire.

Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball.

Name me and emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball.

He recognized that, first, the rich are always desirous of governing for their own benefit, and second that the people can always turn against them and become a mob, taking things into its own hands. As always, the mean between extremes is to be sought.

Those that set in motion the forces of evil cannot always control them afterwards.

One of the most startling commentaries on this century is the fact that millions more have died at the hands of their own governments than in wars with other nations — all to preserve someone's power.

Powerful people were about to make Nien Cheng their favorite sacrificial lamb—or to die trying. They thought she could be used to discredit their opponents. The ransacking of her house had been only a first step.

The darker that all around us seems, the greater the despair in our temporal life, the more light that God shines upon us, the more we feel the power of the Holy Spirit within us.

Only a church free of any outside domination can be the conscience of society and, as Washington pastor Myron Augsburger has written, "hold government morally accountable before God to live up to its own claims."21

How does a Christian deal with the inherent divided loyalties: duty to God and duty to the national interest? Can a Christian successfully avoid the subtle snares of power? Can a Christian make the compromises necessary for the everyday business of politics?

The lure of power can separate the most resolute of Christians from the true nature of Christian leadership, which is service to others. It's difficult to stand on a pedestal and wash the feet of those below.

Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.

They all forget that those who make the least noise do the most work. An engine that expends all its steam in whistling, has nothing left with which to turn wheels. Then let us cultivate silence. All that we can save in noise we gain in power.

Two percent who care deeply about something are a more potent political force than the 98 percent who feel the opposite but aren't motivated enough to do anything about it.

The democratic process will always favor small, well-organized groups at the expense of large, diffuse groups.

She altered "priestly oppression" into "official influence" almost automatically, however, recalling that Anthony had told

I hope you still think that ideas are more dangerous than material things," Quentinsaid. "That was what you were arguing at lunch.

They're beautiful hands," he said; "though they've ruined the world, they're beautiful hands.