Quotes About Power

All the money, all the power—none of it compares to a good book. A book gives you everything. It gives you a window into other souls, other worlds. The world is a door. Books are the key.

Critical literacy focuses on issues of power and promotes reflection, transformation, and action.

To protect patrilineal descent, men have for centuries tried to control women's sexuality. Although man needs woman, he tries to keep her power under control, legislating against women's free use of her sex in case she compromises the fragile but tenacious social structure of our patriarchal society.

Some men are so macho they'll get you pregnant just to kill a rabbit.

Unlike the gifts men give each other that are meant to be widely circulated throughout society, gifts between women are meant to be possessed as private treasure forever, accruing vast social powers for the family over succeeding generations

To write is, moreover, to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power according to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time.

They who were so important, who wanted to create the world, are dumbfounded; everything crumbles.

A man who would agree to betray his own conscience for the sake of a mitre, might well also steal and betray.

There's the gratitude of sons-in-law for you. You poison a king so that they may take his place, and then they do exactly as they please without consideration for anyone!

Peoples bear the weight of curses longer than the princes who incur them.

From being the permanent militia of the Christian world, they had become the permanent bankers of Church and King. To have many debtors is to have many enemies.

Merely by living, man becomes degraded and loses in purity what he gains in power. However clear a spring may be, when it becomes a river it cannot help being polluted by mud and slime.

You know what the common people are like,' said Artevelde; 'they never know their own strength till the moment for using it has passed.

Gracias, Señor, Dios mío, por haberme dejado el odio. Es la única fuerza que me sostiene.

On oublierait vite qu'il (le Roi Phillipe le Bel, apres sa mort) avait musele les puissances, maintenu la paix autant qu'il etait possible, reforme les lois, bati des frotresses pour qu'on put semer a l'abri, unifie les provinces, convie les bourgeois a s'assembler pour donner des avis, et vielle en toutes les choses a l'independence de la France.

Es imposible impedir la guerra cuando los ejércitos comenzaron a marchar.

Power, without the consent of those over whom it is exercised, is a fraud that cannot long endure, a delicate balance between fear and rebellion, which may suddenly be overset when enough men become aware that they all think alike.

Men who love power are not only dominated, as is generally supposed, by an appetite for wealth and honours. Above all they are influenced by an objective taste for the creation of events, for controlling their occurrence, for acting upon the world with effectiveness and for being always in the right. Wealth and honours are no more than the signs and tools of their influence.

The greatest mystery was not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.

And it is because we all of us know of this sombre power and its perilous manifestations, that we stand in so deep a dread of silence. We can bear, when need must be, the silence of ourselves, that of isolation: but the silence of many - silence multiplied - and above all the silence of a crowd - these are supernatural burdens, whose inexplicable weight brings dread to the mightiest soul.

Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes.

Violence is the common origin of all regimes. Life, discussion, and political choice occur only against a background of violence.

The contingency of the future, which accounts for the violent acts of those in power, by the same token deprives these acts of all legitimacy, or equally legitimates the violence of their opponents. The right of the opposition is exactly equal to the right of those in power.

The subject of sensation is a power that is born together with a certain existential milieu or that is synchronized with it.