Quotes About Power

All societies are based on imagined hierarchies, but not necessarily on the same hierarchies. What accounts for the differences

Written language may have been conceived as a modest way of describing reality, but it gradually became a powerful way to reshape reality. When official reports collided with objective reality, it was often reality that had to give way.

De ahí que, paradójicamente, a medida que acumulamos más datos y aumentamos la potencia de nuestros ordenadores, los acontecimientos se tornan más erráticos e inesperados.

A Osama bin Laden, a pesar de todo su odio a la cultura estadounidense, la religión estadounidense y la política estadounidense, le encantaban los dólares estadounidenses. ¿Cómo consiguió triunfar el dinero donde dioses y reyes fracasaron?

Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator.

First, capitalism has created a world that nobody but a capitalist is capable of running. The only serious attempt to manage the world differently – Communism – was so much worse in almost every conceivable way that nobody has the stomach to try again.

A igualdade só pode ser assegurada se forem diminuídas as liberdades daqueles que estão em melhores condições. Garantir que cada indivíduo seja livre para fazer o que desejar inevitavelmente compromete a igualdade.

As bureaucracies accumulate power, they become immune to their own mistakes. Instead of changing their stories to fit reality, they can change reality to fit their stories. In the end external reality matches their bureaucratic fantasies, but only because they forced reality to do so.

SEVENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, HOMO sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem.

Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions.

??levsizli?e kar?? mücadele sömürüye kar?? mücadeleden çok daha zordur.

Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.

O bien uno cree en un Dios único y omnipotente o bien cree en dos poderes opuestos, ninguno de ellos omnipotente. Aún así los humanos poseen una maravillosa capacidad para creer en contradicciones.

All wealth and power might be concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, while most people will suffer not from exploitation, but from something far worse - irrelevance.

Those who resent the mutilation of Indian culture by the British Raj inadvertently sanctify the legacies of the Mughal Empire and the conquering sultanate of Delhi.

Abraham Lincoln said you cannot deceive everybody all the time. Well, that's wishful thinking. In practice, the power of human cooperation networks depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction.

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

What Rwanda earned from an entire year of looting Congolese coltan, the Chinese earn in a single day of peaceful commerce.

the mind is never free of manipulation.

The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within.

La mayoría de las jerarquías sociopolíticas carecen de una base lógica o biológica: no son más que la perpetuación de acontecimientos aleatorios sostenidos por mitos.

To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be

Heavy taxation means that a large part of all available capital accumulated in one place – the state coffers – and consequently more and more decisions have to be made by a single processor, namely the government.

La repetición eterna confiere poder al relato, pues implica que este es el devenir natural de las cosas, y que si Arjuna evita el combate o si Simba rehúsa convertirse en rey, estarán rebelándose contra las leyes mismas de la naturaleza.