Quotes About Power

Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work.

power had trampled his weary, badly-worn face. The Elignon's voice burrowed into the holy man's mind. "Welcome home, Prime Guardian.

The rule of law, properly speaking, is an exercise of authority in which the power of the subjects of that authority to seek and to obtain the satisfaction of their desires is qualified by the obligation to subscribe to certain moral-procedural conditions while leaving them to choose prudentially for themselves the substantive actions and utterances in which to seek such satisfactions.

Strength we think to be a virtue in government, but we do not find our defense against disintegration either in arbitrary or in very great power. Indeed, we are inclined to see in both these the symptoms of an already advanced decay

The pursuit of perfection is far too important to be handed over to the control and direction of a set of people who by blood, force or election have acquired the right to call themselves 'governors'.

potestas is specific, auctoritas is extendable and can grow.

Even reason is individualized, and becomes merely the reasoning of an individual without power or authority to oblige acceptance by others: to convince a man is not to enjoy a common understanding with him, but to displace his reason by yours.111

If you can't fuck it... blow it up.

Mastering others is force. Mastering yourself is true power.

The New Republic had traded efficiency for democracy and oligarchy for bureaucracy—and had done so willingly and knowingly.

The Jedi aren't the Republican Guard. And never will be.

Palpatine sought power over others. Yoda sought power from within. Palpatine wanted control of everything, in the hopes of building what he thought would be a perfect universe. Yoda gave up the idea of controlling or perfecting the universe, in the hopes of understanding it.

The stronger you become in the Force, the more that you can do, the more that's expected of you, and the less your life belongs to you.

Listen -- strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Prior to their discovery in 1917, phages had been linked to miracle waters—rivers in India and other places with the power to cure diseases from leprosy to cholera. Only later did scientists, examining a naturally occurring treatment for dysentery, discover these "cures" were phages, feasting on and eradicating the disease-causing bacteria.

The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.

People who think they're free in this world just haven't come to the end of their leash yet.

As demonstrated in Russia and numerous other countries, when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.

No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except for the ones that succeed.

History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchical structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.

Capitalism is not just an economic system but an entire social order. Once it takes hold, it is not voted out of existence by electing socialists or communists.

The president operates effectively as head of the national security state as long as he stays within the parameters of its primary dedication—which is to advance the interests of corporate investors and protect the overall global capital accumulation process.

The very efficacy of opinion manipulation rests on the fact that we do not know we are being manipulated. The most insidious forms of oppression are those that so insinuate themselves into our communication universe and the recesses of our minds that we do not even realize they are acting upon us. The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.