Quotes About Power

El lenguaje escrito pudo haberse concebido como un medio modesto para describir la realidad, pero gradualmente se convirtió en un medio poderoso para remodelarla.

La fusión de la infotecnología y la biotecnología puede hacer que muy pronto miles de millones de humanos queden fuera del mercado de trabajo y socavar tanto la libertad como la igualdad. Los algoritmos de macrodatos pueden crear dictaduras digitales en las que todo el poder esté concentrado en las manos de una élite minúscula al tiempo que la mayor parte de la gente padezca no ya explotación, sino algo muchísimo peor: irrelevancia.

Yuval Noah Harari

In the late 1830s the Chinese government issued a ban on drug trafficking, but British drug merchants simply ignored the law. Chinese authorities began to confiscate and destroy drug cargos. The drug cartels had close connections in Westminster and Downing Street – many MPs and Cabinet ministers in fact held stock in the drug companies – so they pressured the government to take action. In 1840 Britain duly declared war on China in the name of 'free trade'.

Historically, corporations were not the ideal vehicle for leading social and political revolutions. A real revolution sooner or later demands sacrifices that corporations, their employees and their shareholders are not willing to make.

Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don't tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.

Most nations argue that they are a natural and eternal entity, created in some primordial epoch by mixing the soil of the motherland with the blood of the people. Yet such claims are usually exaggerated. Nations existed in the distant past, but their importance was much smaller than today because the importance of the state was much smaller.

We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.

Like a child in new boots leaping from puddle to puddle, this view sees history as leapfrogging from one bloodbath to the next, from World War One to World War Two to the Cold War, from the Armenian genocide to the Jewish genocide to the Rwandan genocide, from Robespierre to Lenin to Hitler.

Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people, but against an economic elite that does not need them any more.

Once Google, Facebook and other algorithms become all-knowing oracles, they may well evolve into agents and ultimately into sovereigns

Y quizá, lo que es más importante, la inteligencia artificial y la biotecnología están ofreciendo a la humanidad el poder de remodelar y rediseñar la vida. Muy pronto alguien tendrá que decidir cómo utilizar este poder, sobre la base de algún relato implícito o explícito acerca del significado de la vida.

The farm thus became the prototype of new societies, complete with puffed-up masters, inferior races fit for exploitation, wild beasts ripe for extermination and a great God above that gives His blessing to the entire arrangement.

Terrorism is mostly theater. It is a strategy of weakness adopted by those who lack access to real power. During the past decade, terrorists killed every year just a few dozen people in the United States. At the same time, obesity and related illnesses killed tens of thousands of Americans annually. For the average American, Coca-Cola and McDonald's pose a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Finns det något farligare än missnöjda och oansvariga gudar som inte riktigt vet vad de vill?

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. People easily understand that 'primitives' cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take

That's why counterfeiting money has always been considered a much more serious crime than other acts of deception. Counterfeiting is not just cheating – it's a breach of sovereignty, an act of subversion against the power, privileges and person of the king. The legal term is lese-majesty (violating majesty), and was typically punished by torture and death.

If Ugandan politicians think that the power that created the cosmos, the galaxies and the black holes becomes terribly upset whenever two Homo sapiens males have a bit of fun together, then science can help disabuse them of this rather bizarre notion.

Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

The humanities, in contrast, emphasise the crucial importance of intersubjective entities, which cannot be reduced to hormones and neurons. To think historically means to ascribe real power to the contents of our imaginary stories.

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

Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is.

Even Russia nowadays pretends to be a democracy. Victory

Officials kept writing scrolls, collecting taxes, sending orders and oiling the gears of the pharaonic machine.