Quotes About Power

We don't have to paint what we're doing in crass language, understand? Don't use the words money or power, and don't insinuate there are payoffs involved. Perhaps it isn't precisely the most noble or overly patriotic mission, but it can be construed as being in the best interest of continued capitalism and we both know that the U.S. was built and supported by good old capitalism.

I think I'm fascinated by the power of religion in our culture. Like a lot of secular, liberal people, I ignored it for a long time. Lately, of course, just from a political perspective, it's impossible to ignore.

Imagination is a cruel master to the jealous man.

Burke is as small as a white lie and looks as if he might be carried off under the arm of a hefty woman at any second. He feels it too, and smiles cruelly.

The way it had originally worked was that each of the three estates got an equal say: each had an equal number of "deputies" to represent it. This meant that the clergy and the nobility together could outvote anything that the rest, collectively known as "the Third Estate," wanted; the idea of proportional representation—or any meaningful voice for the people—was

As the Iberian explorers made their way down the African coast—the Portuguese going around the Horn to East Asia, the Spaniards cutting west to the Americas—both powers had two main goals in mind: finding precious metals and planting sugarcane. (Oh, and spreading the word of God.) The

eclipsed and forgotten by Mussolini's brief but disastrous alliance with Hitler.

1938, Italians from Milan to Naples had opened their newspapers to discover that they were all "pure Aryan Nordics" and that their Jewish colleagues were dangerous aliens. Jews, including die-hard Fascists, were dismissed from all military, university, and government posts. By that fall, Italian Jews were not allowed to have listed phone numbers, presumably because it corrupted the sea of pure Nordic names in the Italian telephone directory.

Wednesday, June 17, 1789, France went from a system where only the nobility and the church had power to a system where, at least theoretically, the common people did.

Dumas was possibly the strongest man in the French army.… In the riding school he liked to stand up in the stirrups, take hold of an overhead beam, and lift himself and his horse bodily off the ground.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business....

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.

The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading "The Mill on the Floss" to Motor Mechanics.

With tybo men there isn't much difference between fucking and killing.

Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins

The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

The God Gone Mad.

We are all just monkeys with money and guns.

El Diablo hizo el mundo mientras Dios estaba durmiendo.

Ultimately, he decreed that anyone who published a book without prior approval would be excommunicated.