Quotes About Power

the Raj could also dangle jobs before the educated unemployed, councils before the ambitious, and titles before the rich and the vain.

the Empire was naturally attracted towards the foes of its chief Indian foe, the Congress

Life to me was very dangerous and people were not to be trusted; truth to power is very important. My films are still playing to people, because people haven't changed– as a matter of fact, they've gotten worse.

In our hands is a placed power greater with their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand-fold. We can bring the birth the new world from the ashes of the old, for the union makes us strong.

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him

You're a Black educated fool, son. These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them you're lying, they'll tell the world even if you prove you're telling the truth. Because it's the kind of lie they want to hear.

These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them that you're lying, they'll tell the world even if you prove you're telling the truth. Because it's the kind of lie they want to hear …

For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.

For their most innocent words were acts of violence to which we of the campus were hypersensitive though we endured them not.

Then in my mind's eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.

Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.

But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless.

Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

What a group of people we were, I thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked.

He was a cop. A good citizen. But this cop had an itching finger and an eager ear for a word that rhymed with 'trigger,' and when Clifton fell he had found it. The Police Special spoke its lines and the rhyme was completed. Just look around you. Look at what he made, look inside you and feel his awful power. It was perfectly natural. The blood ran like blood in a comic-book killing, on a comic-book street in a comic-book town on a comic-book day in a comic-book world.

Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less--a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force--

Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

Agree 'em to death and destruction," grandfather had advised.

Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it's a habit with them. Why didn't you make an excuse? You're black and living in the South-- did you forget how to lie?

I recalled a report of a shoe-shine boy who had encountered the best treatment in the South simply by wearing a white turban instead of his usual Dobbs or Stetson, and I fell into a fit of laughing.

There's always an element of crime in freedom.

Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.

Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less - a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force -