Quotes About Power

Others may have it in their power to affect how and even whether you live, but they do not, say the Stoics, have it in their power to ruin your life. Only you can ruin it, by failing to live in accordance with the correct values. The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation.

Woe to the rash mortal who seeks to know that of which he should remain ignorant, and to undertake that which surpasseth his power!

parasites seldom altogether abandon a monarch so long as the crown still glitters on his head. ("The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah")

Mine was still the stronger side. I was beloved by the soldiery, who generally care very little what god they serve so long as they are caressed by their king. ("The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah")

All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.

The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.

The state is or can be master of money, but in a free society it is master of very little else.

One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression

O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors: The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark, Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs, Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.

The strongest poison ever knownCame from Caesar's laurel crown.

One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.

Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.

What the hammer? what the chain?In what furnace was thy brain?What the anvil? what dread graspDare its deadly terrors clasp?When the stars threw down their spearsAnd water'd heaven with their tears,Did he smile his work to see?Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

He withers all in silence, and in his hand Unclothes the earth and freezes up frail life.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called 'communism' stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically.

Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.

A terrorist is someone who has a bomb, but doesn't have an air force.

No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

The United States is not concerned with this thing called 'democracy', no matter how many times every American president uses the word each time he opens his mouth. As noted in the Introduction, since 1945 the US has attempted to overthrow more than fifty governments, most of which were democratically elected, and grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least thirty countries.

The United States is not actually against terrorism per se, only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire.

to the American power elite one of the longest lasting and most essential foreign policy goals has been preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a good example of an alternative to the capitalist model. This was the essence of the Cold War. Cuba and Chile were two examples of several such societies in the socialist camp which the United States did its best to crush.

The United States is an equal-opportunity bomber. The only qualifications for a country to become a target are: (a) it poses an obstacle – could be anything – to a particular desire of the American Empire; (b) it is virtually defenseless against aerial attack; (c) it does not possess nuclear weapons.

Where he (Alexander) came the inhabitants either accepted him with roses and wine, or fought and were beaten. He preferred the latter.