Quotes About Power

Bullies bullied not out of some unconscious desire to try to compensate for their low self-esteem. They did it because they could and because they enjoyed it.

forces of nature. A man either ran for

Determination was a superpower, but like any power, it could be used for bad ends.

You know what they say about your greatest strength." "It's also your greatest weakness," she said quietly. "Right. The only defense anyone has is to be aware of both." He used his fork to spear another bite of salmon. "Play to one and guard against the other.

Antigone — Et serre moi. Plus fort que tu ne m'as jamais serrée. Que toute ta force s'imprime dans moi. Hémon — Là. De toute ma force.

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.

The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production.

Take your desires for reality! can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power.

Power itself must be abolished -and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated, which is at the heart of all traditional struggles- but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate. Intelligence cannot, can never be in power because intelligence consists of this double refusal.

Are the mass media on the side of the power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle?

What is man if the signs that predate him have such power? A human race has to invent sacrifices equal to the natural cataclysmic order that surrounds it.

The strategy of power has long seemed founded on the apathy of the masses. The more passive they were, the more secure it was. But this logic is only characteristic of the bureaucratic and centralist phase of power. And it is this which today turns against it: the inertia it has fostered becomes the sign of its death.

There is no longer any difference between the economic and the political, because the same language reigns in both, from one end to the other; a society therefore where the political economy, literally speaking, is finally fully realized.

But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that they [Presidents] were no longer anything but the mannequins of power. Formerly, the king (also the god) had to die, therein lay his power. Today, he is miserably forced to feign death, in order to preserve the blessing of power. But it is lost.

In the classical imagination, Evil was still a mythical power. There was still a Mephisto or a Frankenstein to embody the principle of Evil. Our evil is faceless and without imagination. We no longer need the Devil to steal our shadows. There are no powers doing battle above our heads, fighting over our souls. No longer any need for the lubricious agency of capital to extort our labour-power from us. We no longer have any shadows, any souls, and we are stakeholders in our own lives.

The old form of voluntary servitude was that of free men using that freedom paradoxically to turn themselves into serfs. The new voluntary servitude is that of men obeying the demand that they be free.

Tukenmeye baslayan bir politika dunyasiyla birlikte Cumhurbaskanlari, ilkel toplumlarda bir iktidar kuklasindan baska bir sey olmayan kabile seflerine benzemektedirler.

The balance of terror is the terror of balance.

Action or exaction? Voting, petitions, solidarity, information, human rights: all these things are gently extorted from you in the form of personal or promotional blackmail.

The West, having destroyed its own values, finds itself back at the zero degree of symbolic power, and in a turnabout, it wants to impose the zero degree on everyone. It challenges the rest of the world to annihilate itself symbolically as well. It demands that the rest of the world enter into its game, participate in the generalised, planetary exchange and fall into its trap…There is a moral and philosophical confrontation, almost a metaphysical one, beyond Good and Evil.

Nothing distinguishes a natural intelligence from something that can give off all the outward signs of it, and this includes faltering before the test of truth. So one can give off all the outward signs of power, and this includes faltering before the test of strength. A simulation which produces, with just the requisite degree of derision, the image of an illusory normality.

In the face of extreme reality we are defenceless. But this is only a beginning. We are the aborigines, the anthropoids of the Virtual. In terms of world history, we are barely at the stage of the invention of fire and walking upright. Logically, it remains for us to be exploited and colonized by an even greater power.

The corruption of power is to inscribe into the real everything which is found in dreams….