Quotes About Power

Trump does not picture his role as being a leader; he sees his role as going on national television and criticizing the leadership of others.

Anyone who can be cool about his first visit to the Oval Office has lost so much body heat that rigor mortis is probably about to set in.

As American conservatives have felt the ebb of cultural power away from them, they have come to feel watched and judged. They do not like it. "How does it feel to be a problem?" memorably asked W. E. B. Du Bois.

Far from being a sign of weakness, only surrender to something or someone bigger than us is sufficiently strong to free us from the prison of our egocentricity. Only surrender is powerful enough to overcome our isolation and alienation.

Some view it as too close to submission; others associate it with codependence or an abdication of personal power. Consequently, the notion of surrendering to anything or anyone has become suspect.

Jesus' understanding of his vocation came out of wrestling with God, himself and the devil in the solitude of the wilderness.8 Resisting the temptations to a false self based on power, prestige or possessions, Jesus chose his true identity as the deeply loved Son of God.

When one has the means of getting everything, one winds up giving in to personal demons.

Kore's personal arms were embroidered on the front—on a field gules, a vulture sable vorant a child—a black vulture on a red field devouring a child. Too gaudy for ordinary wear, but perfect for greeting barbarians at the gate.

I have discovered in my long life that there are many words and phrases which have more power than any spell of magick. The most well-known of these is, of course, I love you. But by far the most deadly is, if only. For these two words can strip a man's strength, his courage and his confidence. They become the father of regret and anguish and pain.

a stoic always kept two files in his mind: one for those things that are up to him and within his power, and one for those that are not up to him and thus beyond his power. If you pay lots of attention to events beyond your power, you will ultimately have a life of fear and guilt; you must let those go and pay attention only to those things within your power.

Strange, that Earthpeople always follow one who is not wise, but merely compelling.

Women can be kind of a blood sport.

Just go along with it, he told himself. You get involved with the Night Squad, there's no telling what they might do, even though they work from city hall and are listed officially as policemen.

Capitalism, he noted, is not something imposed on us by some outside force. It only exists because every day we wake up and continue to produce it. If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn't have capitalism anymore.

But if Smith was right, and gold and silver became money through the natural workings of the market completely independently of governments, then wouldn't the obvious thing be to just grab control of the gold and silver mines?

For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they "owe them their lives" (a telling phrase) because they haven't been killed.

Superheroes] aren't fascists. They are just ordinary, decent, super-powerful people who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only political possibility.

if one accepts Jean Piaget's famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.

Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds

If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call "the free market" reflects what they think is useful or important.

the fact that it [the US] can, at will, drop bombs with only a few hours' notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet. No other government has ever had anything remotely like this sort of capacity. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world monetary system, organized around the dollar, together

How inevitable, really, were the type of governments we have today, with their particular fusion of territorial sovereignty, intense administration and competitive politics? Was this really the necessary culmination of human history?

If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager's power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports. The meetings in which such emblems are displayed might be considered the high rituals of the corporate world.

Being forced to pretend to work just for the sake of working is an indignity, since the demand is perceived—rightly—as the pure exercise of power for its own sake.