Quotes About Power

The amazing closeness of American elections has never made sense. In a country in which 10 percent of the population owns 90 percent of the wealth, you'd expect the very rich to be a permanent electoral minority. That it doesn't work out that way is odd. But this is not the kind of observation pundits tend to make.

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.

Scare the crap out of people, and media companies get richer, while state agencies get more and more license for authoritarian crackdowns on the "folk devil" of the moment. A perfect partnership.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections

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.

Taken all together, the whole thing is an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the popular will. The deck is stacked just enough to make sure that nothing ever changes. But enough is left to chance to make sure that hope never completely dies out.

The attorney general of the United States had just admitted, in front of a room full of reporters, that he asks Wall Street for advice before he prosecutes Wall Street.

Ultimately, what we're looking for is someone who's enough of a morally flexible gasbag to get over with the money people, and then also charming enough on some politically irrelevant level to attract voters. (

When we deride journalists as stenographers, it's not about them repeating the words of powerful officials. The real crime is absorbing the ideas of powerful people (often crafted by groups of officials in a dreary corporate process) and repeating them as if they're your own personal thoughts.

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The new America, instead, is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government, whose job is to be good actors on TV and put on a good show.

The mistake our politicians so often make with these industry leaders is in thinking they are interested in, or respectful of, the power of government. All they want is to keep stealing. If you can offer them the government's seal of approval on that, they'll take it. But if you can't, well, they'll take that too.

In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he's unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.

Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that's when the real weirdness begins.

More and more often, we all make silent calculations about who is entitled to what rights, and who is not.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

symbolic violence

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.

The seeds of god-like power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful:The seeds of godlike power are in us still:Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will.

The critical power… tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself… to make the best ideas prevail.