Quotes About Power

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fewer than 5,000 British officials, about 40,000–70,000 British soldiers, and perhaps another 100,000 British business people, hangers-on, wives and children were sufficient to conquer and rule up to 300 million Indians.

Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, gold mines, or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war.

Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often tend to discount it.

Al haber sido hasta hace muy poco uno de los desvalidos de la sabana, estamos llenos de miedos y ansiedades acerca de nuestra posición, lo que nos hace doblemente crueles y peligrosos.

The new Romanian elite that controls the country to this day is composed mostly of former communists and their families.

There were pacifists in the past, such as the early Christians, but in the rare cases that they gained power, they tended to forget about their requirement to 'turn the other cheek'.)

Sapiens use language to create completely new realities. During the last 70,000 years the intersubjective realities that Sapiens invented became ever more powerful, so that today they dominate the world.

Those unable to afford the new miracle treatments – the vast majority of people – will be beside themselves with rage. Throughout history, the poor and oppressed comforted themselves with the thought that at least death is even-handed – that the rich and powerful will also die. The poor will not be comfortable with the thought that they have to die, while the rich will remain young and beautiful for ever.

definitive information was the Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great (c.2250 BC). Sargon began his career as the king of Kish, a small city state in Mesopotamia. Within a few decades he managed to conquer not only all other Mesopotamian city states, but also large territories outside the Mesopotamian heartland.

There is no justice in history

A maior parte das redes de cooperação humana foi concebida para a opressão e a exploração.

A common saying among European soldiers facing African enemies was, 'Come what may, we have machine guns, and they don't.

Yuval Noah Harari

Como você faz as pessoas acreditarem em uma ordem imaginada como o cristianismo, a democracia ou o capitalismo? Primeiro, você nunca admite que a ordem é imaginada. Você sempre insiste que a ordem que sustenta a sociedade é uma realidade objetiva criada pelos grandes deuses ou pelas leis da natureza.

Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having

Ruthless billionaires and small interest groups flourish in today's chaotic world not because they read the map better than anyone else, but because they have very narrow aims.

Una característica de los regímenes iliberales es que dificultan más la libertad de expresión incluso fuera de sus fronteras.

Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites – kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers – who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets. An

When humans domesticated fire, they gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force.

El capitalismo no derrotó al comunismo porque fuera más ético, porque las libertades individuales fueran sagradas o porque Dios estuviera enfadado con los paganos comunistas. Por el contrario, el capitalismo ganó la Guerra Fría porque el procesamiento de datos distribuido funciona mejor que el procesamiento de datos centralizado, al menos en períodos de cambios tecnológicos acelerados.

humans. It's pointless to ask this power for victory in war,

Science and the Industrial Revolution have given humankind superhuman powers and practically limitless energy. The social order has been completely transformed, as have politics, daily life and human psychology. But are we happier? Did the wealth humankind accumulated over the last five centuries translate into a new-found contentment? Did the discovery of inexhaustible energy resources open before us inexhaustible stores of bliss?

Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world. Conquest merely utilised and spread their view of the world.

Never in history did a government know so much about what's going on in the world – yet few empires have botched things up as clumsily as the contemporary United States. It's like a poker player who knows what cards his opponents hold, yet somehow still manages to lose round after round.