Quotes About Power

If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. — American Proverb

top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom.

Banks are institutions to which the government has granted the power to create money—or

The source of status is no longer the ability to make things but simply the ability to purchase them.

The war against the imagination is the only one the capitalists have actually managed to win.

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—or rather, where every day it's more difficult to tell the difference between what can be considered "economic" and what is "political.

What "the public," "the workforce," "the electorate," "consumers," and "the population" all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating.

If being forced to pretend to work is so infuriating because it makes clear the degree to which you are entirely under another person's power, then bullshit jobs are...entire jobs organized on that same principle. You're working, or pretending to work—not for any good reason, at least any good reason you can find—but just for the sake of working.

The problem is, the moment one starts framing things in terms of debt, people will inevitably start asking who really owes what to whom.

Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument. It's true that Native American political

What is the difference between a gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you give him a thousand dollars of "protection money," and that same gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you provide him with a thousand-dollar "loan"? In

Major landowners, military commanders, priests, administrators and other senior government officials also held titles like 'Keeper of the King's Secrets', 'Beloved Acquaintance of the King', 'Director of Music to the Pharaoh', 'Overseer of the Palace Manicurists' or even 'of the King's Breakfast'.

Henry Ford once remarked that if ordinary Americans ever found out how the banking system really worked, there would be a revolution tomorrow.)

The treasury is based upon mining, the army upon the treasury; he who has army and treasury may conquer the whole wide earth.

If Kim Kardashian walks down the street in Paris wearing a diamond necklace worth millions of dollars, she is not only showing off her wealth, she is also flaunting her power over violence, since everyone assumes she would not be able to do so without the existence, visible or not, of an armed personal security detail, trained to deal with potential thieves.

ancient Rome had conquered the world three times: the first time through its armies, the second through its religion, the third through its laws.91 He might have added: each time more thoroughly.

The effect, though, is that American imperial power is based on a debt that will never—can never—be repaid.

It is a testimony to the genuine lingering power of leftist ideals that anyone would even consider voting for a party that promoted this sort of thing—because surely, if they do, it's not because they actually think these are good policies, but because these are the only policies anyone who identifies themselves as left-of-center is allowed to set forth.

One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts: that is, the role of war and military power. There's a reason why the wizard has such a strange capacity to create money out of nothing. Behind him, there's a man with a gun.

Kingdoms rise and fall; they also strengthen and weaken; governments may make their presence known in people's lives quite sporadically, and for many people in history, it was not at all clear whose government they were actually in. Even until quite recently, many of the world's inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter.

here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.

Amerika'daki rejimler hiçbir zaman özel olarak serbest ticaretle ilgilenmemiÅŸtir. Amerikal?lar özellikle uluslararas? yönetim yap?lar? kurmakla daha çok uÄŸraÅŸm??lard?r.

the more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm.

States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least