Quotes About Power

good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.

So that human beings were miraculous indeed - conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiously, wondering as he looked at their often innocuous exteriors what kind of new Paracelsus or Isaac of Holland stood before him, and whether they would turn lead to gold, or cause rocks to blossom.

Fuck Margaret Thatcher, I said when I could catch my breath. And I say it again now: fuck Margaret Thatcher, and fuck every idiot who thinks that way. I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real.

The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the many privileges of capital

At this point we need them to feel disliked and outnumbered. Hell, mass numbers of people in the streets are about the only thing that scare governments, if you ask me.

That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings.

The invisible hand never picks up the check.

She recalled hearing how after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, they had built prison camps faster than medical facilities. They had expected riots and so had put people of color in jail preemptively. But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages, the age of fascisms both home and abroad. Since

But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.

Mass demonstration and insurrection are the only things that will beat them, history shows this.

But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet's wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world's wealth. For them it wasn't so bad.

it looked like the centuries-long wrestling match between state and capital had ended in a decisive victory for capital. Possibly

when you are a small minority and you own the majority's wealth, security is naturally a primary consideration.

Anyway that's a large part of what economics is—peo-ple arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.

Sure, we could have big trucks too. We could have a monster truck pull right on the White House lawn." "Monster truck." Joe smiled at the phrase.

It was Trotsky who said the party is always trying to keep up with the masses. Strategy comes from below and tactics from above, not the reverse...

I guess if you were going to do something so stupid as to be president, you would want to go for something big." "I think so. The temptation is there. I mean, you wouldn't do it thinking, Hey, now that I'm president I'll play it safe, hope nothing happens. Would you?

Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government. So that the national governments in trying to restrain the transnats were like the Lilliputians trying to tie down Gulliver.

My body worked so well that eventually all things everywhere were swallowed and digested by me. I grew so large that I ate the world, and all the blood in the world is mine. What am I? You know, even though you are like everything else, and see me from the inside. I am the market.

We pretend that democracy is real, and

We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.

It's stupid because it makes the assumption that your enemies are weaker than you, and will do what you want if you murder a few of them. But people aren't like that. I mean, think about how it will fall out. You go down that canyon and kill a bunch of people doing their jobs, and later other people come along and find the bodies. They'll hate you forever. Even if you do take over Mars someday they'll still hate you, and do anything they can to screw things up.

history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren't looking — an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.

Thus the power of hegemony: we may be poor but at least we're patriots! At least we're self-reliant and we can