Quotes About Power

Survival of the fittest, which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order....

We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money.

Historical explanation is not just a matter of the practice of historians, but of the nature of reality. And in reality, physical events are constrained by general laws — or if they are not laws, they are at least extraordinarily detailed descriptions of the links between an event and those that follow it, allowing predictions that, if not deterministically exact, are still accurate enough to give us enormous power over physical reality.

the shift from feudal land power to bourgeois money power was complete.

When you have a country formed out of a lot of groups that don't trust each other, with one a clear majority, then you get what they call 'census voting,' where politicians represent their groups, and get their votes, and election results are always just a reflection of population numbers. In that situation the same thing happens every time, so the majority group has a monopoly on power, and the minorities feel hopeless, and eventually rebel.

that's a large part of what economics is—people 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.

So we were shouted at, we were beat on. "What gives you the right to do this! Who do you think you are!" We replied to this in the thousand-voice chorus, at a volume of 115 decibels: "WE ARE THE RULE OF LAW.

What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one's options, and reduce one's freedom. One became a servant of one's wealth or power, constrained to spend all one's time protecting it.

Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government

Hierarchy, you know. And their place in the hierarchy. As long as it's high enough. Everyone bound into their places. It's safer than freedom. And a lot of people are cowards.

In a storm the Flatiron appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer—a picture of new America still in the making. said Alfred Steiglitz

Even the Chinese with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their local power in Asia, were not as bad as the Americans when it came to imperial self-regard pretending to be charity, as in the structural adjustment procedures at the end of the twentieth century

What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.

Power wasn't a matter of job titles, after all. Power was a matter of vision, persuasiveness, freedom of movement, fame, influence. The figurehead stands at the front, after all, pointing the way.

There have been mass delusions larger than this," I said, "following a fanatic leader.

And the unequal accumulation of wealth by the elites continued.

because economics was above all a system of quantified ethics and political power that depended on measurement.

At this point justice and revenge are the same thing! Justice for people would be revenge on the oligarchs.

Swiss citizens in general used about 5,000 watts. This was compared to 6,000 in the rest of western Europe. Chinese citizens about 1,500. 1,000 in India. 12,000 in the United States. His country, the great whale in this as in everything, slurping down the world.

People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better.

All of them were arrayed against the usual resistance of entrenched power and privilege and the economic system encoding these same, but now with the food panic reminding everyone that mass death was a distinct possibility, some progress was possible, for

That's a large part of what economics is--people 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.

in certain senses the transnationals were expressions of these nations—extensions of their power into the rest of the world, in a way that reminded Sax of what little he knew of the imperial and colonial systems that had preceded them. Frank had said something like that: colonialism had never died, he used to declare, it just changed names and hired local cops. We're all colonies of the transnats.

and indeed many of those harmed often vote for politicians who will increase their relative impoverishment. Thus the power of hegemony: we may be poor but at least we're patriots!