Quotes About Power

If you want to get your outcasts out of sight, first you need a ghetto and then you need a prison to take pressure off the ghetto. . . . Short-term terror and revulsion are more powerful than long-term wisdom or self-interest.

We see here the commitment to employ what terrorizes and repels, and does so powerfully, in order to have an effect of keeping certain groups in place or moving them from one realm to another. All of this is to commit those with governing powers to a show, a spectacle that displays power and creates motivating terror.

Their means may be strategically effective as in the work of the Black Panthers in Chicago, with Fred Hampton's efforts there before he was assassinated by police. Their means may be, in other contexts, less effective than were the Black Panthers and other groups. In either case, though, they are termed "social dynamite" because they are, or can be perceived as, a major threat to the functioning of the economic and political order.

I cite here, again, Gilmore's definition: "Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

I include as "economically elite" not just the fraction of the one-percent who control the nation's financial portfolio, as it were, those who have the largest incomes and economic power. I include within the culture of the economic elite those other groups who live dependent upon, or in proximity to, this largely white overclass.

Violated peoples do not forget. They dream alternatives and organize against overwhelming power. In the U.S., organized and creative resistance has an equally long history. In

We cannot serve the executed God and the god of religious respectability.

The major aim of this social leveraging is to further lock in the power of the white/nonwhite binary. This exploitative logic does that quite well. Again, we see here the resiliency of white supremacy's imposition and use of the black/white binary, and as part of white supremacy's mode of reinforcing itself against the stereotypes of all non-white peoples. Asians

The prisons of today preserve and display the way the black-white antithesis has been deployed in white supremacist logic and persists as a dominant structure. That is to say, in today's prisons an "anti-black white racism" constitutes a white supremacist order of power deployed against all non-white groups. In

The police are often the frontline for surveillance, control, and dissemination of terror in poor communities.

The executed God is a force of life that is greater than the assemblage of imperial powers and foments necessary resistance and hope for people today.

Its meaning is that a God of life endures and somehow surprisingly continues to mobilize an effective and comprehensive resistance to executing state powers and its structural violence. What

In short, for supplying and controlling both natural resources (oil) essential for U.S. economic life, and also for nurturing U.S. group identity, the deaths of the poor are necessary. They are sacrifices that power the U.S.-led imperium.

The state, she writes, "is not a thing, system, or subject, but a significantly unbounded terrain of powers and techniques, an ensemble of discourses, rules and practices, cohabiting in limited, tension-ridden, often contradictory relation with one another.

At its best, the expression crucified God reminds us that the power of all life, "God," faces and suffers the worst that a creature can endure and emerges with newfound power, strength, and hope. What

Critique of the 1 percent's domination predates, it should be recalled, the "Occupy" movement's popularizing of the notion. In fact, Martin Luther King, Jr. remarked often on the notion of the 1 percent in his early speeches of the 1950s: "They tell me that one tenth of one percent of the population controls more than forty percent of the wealth. Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxury to the classes.

The crucified God takes believers on a journey into earth, into its pain and suffering, and finds in that journey not the holiness of pain but the wonder of life's power to persist and transform. The way of the crucified God seeks God in earth's humanity, which has been abandoned, rejected, and despised, the people who know life amid their struggle.

When you abandon the Lord, it's only a matter of time before you start worshipping the Führer.

Identity liberalism has ceased being a political project and has morphed into an evangelical one. The difference is this: evangelism is about speaking truth to power. Politics is about seizing power to defend the truth.

At some level, people must be thinking that the more they learn about what is predetermined, the more control they will have. This is an illusion. Human beings want to feel that they are on a power walk into the future, when in fact we are always just tapping our canes on the pavement in the fog.

This is a classic ploy familiar to revolutionary leaders throughout history: the failure of the revolution proves the need to radicalize it. This is why, for decades now, Americans have been spectators at the dark comedy of Republicans running for office successfully against "the government"—and then, once in power, running for reelection on the promise to bring down "the government" they themselves control.

But in a democracy the only way to meaningfully defend them—and not just make empty gestures of recognition and "celebration"—is to win elections and exercise power in the long run, at every level of government. And the only way to accomplish that is to have a message that appeals to as many people as possible and pulls them together. Identity liberalism does just the opposite.

We cannot criticise global warming sceptics for denying the scientific consensus on climate when we ignore the same consensus on both the safety and the beneficial uses of nuclear power and genetic engineering.

Either way, nuclear power is the only means by which we can generate prodigious amounts of energy with only a tiny human footprint on the planetary biosphere.