Quotes About Power

Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.

Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralising as earth, air, and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god . . . It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.

In the strictest sense, anxiety is not a problem at all, but a sign that we are in touch with our intuitive powers. In previous chapters we saw how the discipline of any judgmental or deceptive

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.

If the Eloquent peasant finally obtained justice, as seems indicated at the point where the document breaks off, it was only, we should remember, after he had been teased and tormented, even flogged, by his betters merely to increase their amusement over his delightful impudence in standing up for his rights and answering back.

Significantly, it was during the third dynasty of Ur-a period of viogorous constructive activity-that all the kings except the founder claimed divinity. This evidence decisively couples divine kingship with the characteristic public works program of the megamachine. Little tasks might still be left to little men, but big tasks belonged to the king by reason of the special powers he commanded: above all, the unique power to create a colossal labor machine.

Nothing short of a revolutionary uprising can account for the inter-regnum of some two centuries that separated the 'Old Kingdom' from the 'Middle Kingdom.' And though the archaic power complex was finally restored, it was modified by various important concessions, including the extension of immortality (once a Pharaonic or upper-class privilege) to the population at large.

Both sacred power and temporal power became swollen by absorbing the new inventions of civilization; and the very need for an intelligent control of every part of the environment gave additional authority to those dedicated either to intelligence or control, the priest or monarch, often united in a single office.

But instead of freeing labor, the royal mega-machine boasted of imprisoning and enslaving it.

The power system admits only one kind of complexity, that which conforms to its own method and belongs to the current period: a system so uniform that its components are in effect interchangeable parts, conceived as if by a single collective mind.

The masters of the underground citadel are committed to a 'war' they cannot bring to an end, with weapons whose ultimate effects they cannot control, for purposes that they cannot accomplish.

The megamachine is an elephant that fears even the smallest mouse.

To describe even in the barest outline the multitude of changes necessary to turn the power complex into an organic complex, and a money economy into a life economy, lies beyond the capacities of any individual mind; any attempt at a detailed picture would be presumptuous.

Each one of us, as long as life stirs in him, may play a part in extricating himself from the power system by asserting his primacy as a person in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal-in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate him from the domination of the pentagon of power.

Through the army, in fact, the standard model of the megamachine was transmitted from culture to culture.

Agamemnon reproached Clytemnestra for her servile effusiveness of speech: "As a man, not as a god, let me be honored." The delusion of divinity in a ruler was a product of their civic decadence.

But now the forces challenging the power complex have a special advantage that derives from the advances in technology: its members, however separated in space, are united in time, are united in space through books, discs, taped records, and frequent, quickly arranged face-to-face meetings. Hence resistance to the megamachine is no longer pathetically sporadic, but increasingly coordinated through constant inter-viewing as well as inter-communication.

The production of the atom bomb was in fact crucial to the building of the new megamachine, little though anyone at the time had that larger objective in mind. For it was the success of this project that gave the scientists a central place in the new power complex and resulted eventually in the invention of many other instruments that have rounded out and universalized the system of control first established to meet only the exigencies of war.

In the 'Instructions for King Merikere,' written in the inter-regnum between the Old and the Middle Kingdoms of Egypt, we read: "Be a craftsman in speech, so that thou mayest prevail, for the power [of a man] is the tongue, and speech is mightier than fighting.

Now the equipment, organization, and tactics of an army were not achieved overnight: one must allow for a period of transition before a large mass of men could be trained to operate under unified command. Until towns arose and population was sufficiently concentrated, the prelude to war was an organized but one-sided display of power and bellicosity in raiding expeditions for wood, malachite, gold, slaves.

A personal over-concentration upon power as an end in itself is always suspect to the psychologist: he reads into it an attempt to conceal inferiority, impotence, anxiety. When this tendency is combined with inordinate ambitions, uncontrolled hostility and suspicion, and a loss of any sense of the subject's own limitations, leading to 'delusions of grandeur,' this becomes the typical syndrome of paranoia: one of the most difficult psychological states to exorcise.

The great secret of centralized power was secrecy itself. That holds of all totalitarian states down to our own day.

The aim of industry is not primarily to satisfy essential human needs with a minimal productive effort, but to multiply the number of needs, factitious or fictitious, and accommodate them to the maximum mechanical capacity to produce profits. These are the sacred principles of the power complex.