Quotes About Power

About the cathouse: the notion that an accepted element in the social order is a whorehouse goes hand in hand with the woman on a pedestal.

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.

Years ago, if a white woman said a Black man looked at her lustfully, he could be hung higher than a magnolia tree in bloom, while a white mob watched joyfully sipping tea and eating cookies," Yusef Salaam's mother reminded readers of the Amsterdam News.

That we had been drawn, both by a misapprehension of the local rhetoric and by the manipulation of our own rhetorical weaknesses, into a game we did not understand, a play of power in a political tropic alien to us, seemed apparent, and yet there we remained.

there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Gandhi on Nonviolence, Louis Fischer's Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Jerome Frank's Breaking the Thought Barrier, Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti's The First and Last Freedom and Think on These Things, C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite, Huxley's Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media.

their reading: Gandhi on Nonviolence, Louis Fischer's Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Jerome Frank's Breaking the Thought Barrier, Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti's The First and Last Freedom and Think on These Things, C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite, Huxley's Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. On the fifth day

To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers?

Every word uttered at the Center is preserved on tape, and not only colleges and libraries but thousands of individuals receive Center tapes and pamphlets. Among the best-selling pamphlets have been A. A. Berle, Jr.'s Economic Power and the Free Society, Clark Kerr's Unions and Union Leaders of Their Own Choosing, Donald Michael's Cybernation: The Silent Conquest, and Harrison Brown's Community of Fear.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

It occurs to me as I write that this white light, usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact precisely consistent with the oxygen deficit that occurs as blood flow to the brain decreases. Everything went white, those whose blood pressure has dropped say of the instant before they faint.

There was more to be said for the power of regret than was often said.

He will toss everything aside if he must—Uther, the high kingship, Britain—before he will give up Morgan.

If you scream, people say you're melodramatic; if you submit, you're masochistic; if you call names, you're a bitch. Hit him and he'll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose a rescuer doesn't come?

Thunder sounded again, low and rumbling like the growl of some predatory beast. Hannah

Gods? Don't let that impress you. Anyone can be a god if they have enough worshippers. You don't even have to have powers anymore. In my time I've seen theatre gods, gladiator gods, even storyteller gods - you people see gods everywhere. Gives you an excuse for not thinking for yourselves. God is just a word. Like Fury. like demon, Just words people use for things they don't understand. Reverse it and you get dog. It's just as appropriate.

Sticks and stones may break my bones', as they say in the Middle Worlds, but with the right words you can build a world and make yourself the king of it.

Remember, it's the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings.

Better a king in the gutter,' he said, 'than a slave in an emperor's place

A named thing is a tamed thing.

Those people who say that words have no power know nothing of the nature of words. Words, well placed, can end a regime; can turn affection to hatred; can start a religion or even a war. Words are the shepherds of lies; they lead the best of us to the slaughter.

Not that a promise means much to a demon - or a god.

If knowledge was power I had under my possession the entire school