Quotes About Power

Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.

people are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential—the healthy, the fit, and the powerful.

It's Mississippi, stupid," Neville said. "They can do whatever they like.

Omnes mundum facimus.

White folks' belief that Negroes were magically gifted struck her as the most absurd form of superstition. Sorcery was in the Bible, which meant it was real, but to Momma it was self-evident that like every other kind of power it would be concentrated in the hands of the mighty.

Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

Too-big-to-fail, meet small-enough-to-jail.

Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

These leaders are like the drug lords who ruled America's ghettos in the crack age, men (and some women) interested in just two things: staying in power, and hoovering up enough of what's left of the cash on their blocks to drive around in an Escalade or a 633i for however long they have left.

We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

You can tell a lot about a country by how boring its media is. If you turn on the TV and immediately feel like going to sleep, it generally means the political class feels secure.

Donald Trump, if elected, would find a way to turn being the president into a moneymaking operation. Sanders

Bill Clinton's political formula for seizing the presidency was simple. He made money tight in the ghettos and let it flow free on Wall Street. He showered the projects with cops and bean counters and pulled the cops off the beat in the financial services sector. And in one place he created vast new mountain ranges of paperwork, while in another, paperwork simply vanished.

There are people in the world worth laughing at. They're called politicians.

The only constant will be more and more authoritarian solutions. In the social media age, we can scare you as never before. Which means politicians will have an easier time obtaining permission for censorship, surveillance, immigration bans, and other expanded powers.

Banks like Goldman remain largely shielded from the impact of public opinion because while the public's only link to power is through the clumsy and highly imperfect avenue of elections, a bank of this size has a whole network of intimate connections with direct access to policy. In

Goldman is not a company of geniuses, it's a company of criminals. And far from being the best fruit of a democratic, capitalist society, it's the apotheosis of the Grifter Era, a parasitic enterprise that has attached itself to the American government and taxpayer and shamelessly engorged itself on us all.

It turns out that it's a waste of absolute political power to simply throw undocumented aliens over the border. When you have a group of people who have no rights at all, the more inspired corporate solution is to extract as much value from them as possible. That can be money, that can be property, and if they don't have either of those things left, you take their time and labor.

Does anyone seriously believe that powerful people would allow truly dangerous ideas to be broadcast on TV? The news today is a reality show where you're part of the cast: America vs. America, on every channel.

He was a walking cut corner, a thumb on the scale of American history. The

It boggles my mind that people think they're practicing real political advocacy by watching major corporate TV, be it Fox or MSNBC or CNN. Does anyone seriously believe that powerful people would allow truly dangerous ideas to be broadcast on TV?

Greenspan's rise is instead a tale of a gerbilish mirror-gazer who flattered and bullshitted his way up the Matterhorn of American power and then, once he got to the top, feverishly jacked himself off to the attentions of Wall Street for twenty consecutive years—in the process laying the intellectual foundation for a generation of orgiastic greed and overconsumption and turning the Federal Reserve into a permanent bailout mechanism for the super-rich.

Listening in anger to your favorite political program, you will act like a person who is shaking a fist at power, when in fact you've been neutralized as an independent threat, reduced to a prop in a show.

If you're a person of means, you get full service for all ten amendments, and even a few that aren't listed. But if you owe, if you rent, you get a slightly thinner, more tubercular version of the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and so on.