Quotes About Power

the story of how "Francoism" was built – bottom up as a repressive, carceral society – as well as top down as a political regime.

the not uncommon sexual humiliation of priests as a prelude to their murder,

allowing the maintenance of dictatorial "impunity".

What is demonstrably the case is that Franco did Hitler the colossal service of altering the European balance of power in favour of the German-Italian Axis, while Spanish Republican resistance, achieved for nearly three years in the teeth of British policy, actively delayed other forms of Nazi aggression in Europe and, in so doing, made Britain itself a priceless gift of time to re-arm.

the Republic was seeking to defend itself against a rebel onslaught backed by the industrial might and military muscle of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Terror could only happen because the military allowed it.

the fear-driven social purification underpinning Francoism,

You can't undo actions with words.

It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks.

It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal.

Confidence is the master of fate.

Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas.

He touched her as though she were something precious and cared for. That was where the terrible power lay—not in his strength, not in some dark bespellment. His power existed because he could make her believe things she had cast away. Things that had cast her away. Things beyond reaching. If he could make her believe, she would be lost. She would never survive. The fear inside her head overwhelmed her.

When we fracture our potential for united action and divide ourselves along social, political, economic, or religious lines, we diminish our power.

The value she gave to the power of relationship was fundamental to Lucretia [Mott]'s sense of social activism.

There is no perfect way to make a demand on power. There is no way to do feminism which will protect you from being attacked. You have to be honest with yourself: am I really being unreasonable? Or is the problem with the rest of the world? If it is the latter, then don't be derailed.

If feminism doesn't frighten people with power, it is toothless.

The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.

The hawk is on my fist. Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket; a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards lives' ends.

There's a superstition among falconers that a hawk's ability is inversely proportional to the ferocity of its name. Call a hawk Tiddles and it will be a formidable hunter; call it Spitfire or Slayer and it will probably refuse to fly at all.

What I was doing wasn't just educating myself in the nuts and bolts of hawk-training: I was unconsciously soaking up the assumptions of an imperial elite. I lived in a world where English peregrines always outflew foreign hawks, whose landscapes were grouse moors and manor houses, where women didn't exist. These men were kindred spirits. I felt I was one of them, one of the elect. I

The hawk had caught me. It was never the other way around.

Consider this, and in our time As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman:

The goshawk is staring at me in mortal terror, and I can feel the silences between both our heartbeats coincide. Her eyes are luminous, silver in the gloom. Her beak is open. She breathes hot hawk breath in my face. It smells of pepper and musk and burned stone. Her feathers are half-raised and her wings half-open, and her scaled yellow toes and curved black talons grip the glove tightly. It feels like I'm holding a flaming torch.