Quotes About Power

A man with a rifle is a citizen; a man without one is merely a subject.

The power of community to create health is far greater than any physician, clinic or hospital.

Fearfulness is not of God. The Holy Spirit is not one who makes us fearful; rather He gives us spiritual power, a heart full of love, and a mind that is sound and understanding. Fear comes from another spirit. Satan and his demons are quick to author fear. The apostle Peter calls us to: "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: whom resist stedfast in the faith" (1 Peter 5:8–9a KJV).

In a most wonderful way, our Lord moved upon me, and for nearly thirty minutes I was able to share of God's love, mercy, and transforming power through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Fearfulness is not of God. The Holy Spirit is not one who makes us fearful; rather He gives us spiritual power, a heart full of love, and a mind that is sound and understanding.

In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated. Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the last pharaoh abdicating in 1912. For China, the last century has been a period of transition - dramatic change and perpetual revolution.

This was a pure case of governing by intimidation, which is the essence of authoritarianism.

the capital commandments of self-interest, self-importance, self-enrichment, and self-perpetuation.

Nunes's once-promising career in Congress had been given over fully to being a house organ for Trump.

This Republican party dances to whatever tunes come into Mr. Trump's head," wrote Edward Luce of the Financial Times.

Bottom line: any ambivalence Graham had over Trump's conduct (for example, for trashing his best friend to the grave and beyond) was eclipsed by his desperation to remain a U.S. senator.

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S YES-MEN—AND THEIR MASCARA!)

With its architectural grandeur, Senator Gore said, our capital would someday "make wonderful ruins.

At its best, the expression crucified God reminds us that the power of all life, God, faces and suffers some of the worst that a creature can endure and emerges with newfound power, strength, and hope. What is sacralized or made holy is not suffering but the facing and endurance of suffering with hope and life.

Mark's story of Jesus' last days . . . is an intensely political drama, filled with conspiratorial backroom deals and covert action, judicial manipulation and prisoner exchange, torture and summary execution . . . And we do well not to forget that this very narrative of arrest, trial and torture is still lived out by countless political prisoners around the world today. Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man

We are trapped in the jaws of something shaking the life out of us." With these words from his historical novel, Philadelphia Fire, John Edgar Wideman conveys a sense of what it means to be caught out on stage, vulnerable at the point of having one's life taken, shaken out, by what I have term "the theatrics of state terror." Wideman's

Throughout U.S. history—whether it was a matter of controlling indigenous peoples across Western lands that white settlers wanted to occupy, black populations deemed unruly, or laborers not complying with the economic usurpation of a white overclass—the weaponry of military and local policing have often comingled.

The power of "the state" emanates both from the U.S. nation and also through the relations by which it is embedded in global, transnational networks of power.

Poor and immigrant communities feel most directly the spectacle and its terror. Other groups of U.S. residents, especially our threatened middle-class and white communities who (often wrongly) think they are safe from such official terror, are induced by the spectacle of paramilitary sweeps and SWAT operations to support and rationalize the powerful displays of state power.

The power to execute invests a near absolute power in the state. As Robert Meeropol has suggested, the granting of such absolute power most surely tends to corrupt, and especially to corrupt democracy. Meeropol's own parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed in 1953 when he was six years old.

In the U.S. of the last several decades, this consolidation of economic wealth and power constitutes the important political backdrop of the rise of the carceral state. It benefits, too, from the historical backdrop—the legacies of genocide, slavery, racialized caste systems, and other forms of structural violence of the U.S. past.

When the state is given absolute power, in this case to calculate and terminate the end of a human life, the state assumes a power that is "absolute," extending its domination to the borders of life and death. According to Meeropol, when people give that power to the state, they sacrifice their popular sovereignty. Executions function not to serve the people but as another mode of rule in today's theatrics of state terror. I

Michel Foucault reminds us that in societies that organize massively to incarcerate its citizens "there is no outside" for anyone.

Lockdown America is an assemblage of powers that orchestrates this interplay of the U.S. as a nation embedded in global state structures with the various structures of domination that play throughout the nation in our current period. White racism is one of these "structures of domination." It