Quotes About Power

Totalitarian power thrives when it alienates people from basic information about themselves. When European slavers abducted people from Africa, they essentially took away their history as well.

Dedication and responsibility, Far beyond the laws governed by man, Releases the power within you, To attain all the wisdom of the universe.

They're power-hungry, the mundane said of the magical people. They're immoral, people said, and they're scary. Playing with the dark arts could plunge me into evil. I'd be pulled toward depravity. Blasphemy would begin to seem like truth, bad like good, God like Satan. It had happened to people through the centuries, they said. And they were right. All that did happen.

In 1776, only 22 percent of the colonists in Massachusetts were Puritans, and even the Puritans practiced magic. "Colonial Americans were, in fact, more likely to turn to magical or occult techniques in their effort to avail themselves of superhuman power than they were to Christian rituals or prayer

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sólo los políticos se arrogan el derecho a condonar o perdonar en nombre de todos, cosa inconcebible para un crimen de masas o un genocidio.

Recuerdo haber visto, en imágenes de archivo, a cerdos paseándose por la Biblioteca Nacional de Phnom Penh, vaciada por los jemeres rojos. Derribaban sillas y pisoteaban mondaduras. Los cerdos sustituían a los libros. Y nosotros sustituíamos a los cerdos.

Cuál es el régimen político más inhumano? El que decreta el bien del hombre.

Es una defensa clásica en los sistemas totalitarios: todos los verdugos afirman estar aterrorizados. Tal vez en parte sea cierto. El torturador puede tener miedo, pero tiene elección. El prisionero sólo tiene miedo

The buildings that I build very often have a dreamlike reality. I don't mean by that they have a fantasy quality at all, in fact quite the reverse. They contain in some degree the ingredients that give dreams their power... stuff that's very close to us.

Daddy," said the toddler, now seething with righteous indignation, "you are a poo-poo head!" Feigning outrage, JFK lowered his voice. "John," he said, "no one calls the President of the United States a poo-poo head.

Ignorance is a right! Education is eroding one of the few democratic freedoms remaining to us.

Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.

Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White's strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other's domain.

He checks the horns. They're small: not truncated like Hellboy's, but wee, budding, trainer-bra efforts. Definitely not the thing that killed Dazza. In demon terms, he's looking at a midget or a waen. He recalls the ten second rule, and though they only clashed for a moment, it was more than enough. He understands. He has the measure. There is no paralysis by fear. There will be no subconscious surrender to superior mental force and aggression. In short, he can take this cunt.

People seldom appreciated just how vital and positive raw hatred could be.

Oil they would buy from anyone. From Satan.

Nothing raises the national temperature more than a VACANCY sign hanging from the colonnaded front of the Supreme Court.

Let's look at this rationally...We've got a doctor who may kill him, an Attorney General who wants to declare him bananas, and a Defense Secretary who wants me to start World War III...First, we ruled out starting World War III. We were down to killing the President or having him carted off by the men in white coats...

You could drink hard liquor in the middle of a school day without people assuming you were an alcoholic underachiever. Strange how in America in the 1950s, at the height of its industrial and imperial power, men drank double-martinis for lunch. Now, in its decline, they drank fizzy water. Somewhere something had gone terribly wrong.

Oderint dum metuant." "You're going to have to translate that for me. I didn't go to Gratin." "It's Groton. Means 'Let them hate, so long as they fear.' Cato.

Why should you give up God because of gunpowder? Since the world began, God in his wisdom has given us tools with which to slaughter each other. Jawbones of asses. Slings. Swords. Crossbows. Why shouldn't he give us gunpowder?

Foucault thus provides a sophisticated, language-based version of the class antagonisms of Marx - he relies on beliefs about the inherent evil of the individual's class position, or professional position, seen as `discourse', regardless of the morality of his or her individual conduct.

Three weeks before Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem was ousted and then murdered in a coup that Kennedy had authorized.