Quotes About Power

Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or humans will come to live in "digital dictatorships.

In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. We just don't know what to pay attention to, and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfed and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?

fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power. You will have to admit things—for example, about the sources of your own power—that will anger allies,

In the minds of the illiterate peasants, who did not speak Latin, "Hoc est corpus!" got garbled into "Hocus-pocus!" Thus was born the powerful spell that can transform a frog into a prince and a pumpkin into a carriage.6

Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience. In the following chapters we will see time and again how a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering.

If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.

La historia es algo que ha hecho muy poca gente mientras que todos los demás araban los campos y acarreaban barreños de agua.

In the twenty-first century, however, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humankind will split into different species.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as gods, nations and corporations.

all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance.

Terrorism is the weapon of a marginal and weak segment of humanity. How did it come to dominate global politics?

Given the proven human propensity for misusing power, it seems naïve to believe that the more clout people have, the happier they will be.

Scholars throughout history have faced this dilemma: Do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? The most powerful scholarly establishments--whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins, or Communist ideologues--placed unity above truth. That's why they were so powerful.

Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.

In the end it was communism that collapsed. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag.

You can do many things with bayonets, but it is rather uncomfortable to sit on them.

By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.8

Just try to imagine how difficult it would have been to create states, or churches, or legal systems if we could speak only about things that really exist, such as rivers, trees and lions.

The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century - the attempt to concentrate all information in one place - might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first cenutry.

Cómo se hace para que la gente crea en un orden imaginado como el cristianismo, la democracia o el capitalismo? En primer lugar, no admitiendo nunca que el orden es imaginado.

military power cannot go far in the twenty-first century, and that waging a successful war means waging a limited war.

the rise of AI might eliminate the economic value and political power of most humans.

A pirate who loots a Spanish treasure fleet and buries a chest full of glittering coins on the beach of some Caribbean island is not a capitalist.