Quotes About Power

with a fading of the individual's creative powers there appears a pronounced inclination toward joining a mass movement. Here the connection between the escape from an ineffectual self and a responsiveness to mass movements is very clear. The slipping author, artist, scientist—slipping because of a drying-up of the creative flow within—drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, uplift promoters and champions of holy causes.

In times of revolution nothing is more powerful than the fall of symbols.

Pocas cosas hay más peligrosas que un imperio que persigue su propio interés con la creencia de que le está haciendo un favor a la humanidad.

En términos morales, los imperios siempre se han justificado a sí mismos, y en ocaciones no sin una cierta sinceridad, tanto cuando afirmaban que llevaban (su versión de) civilización o la religión a unos pueblos sumidos en la ignorancia, como cuando decían llevar (su versión de) la libertad a los oprimidos (por otro imperio) o, en la actualidad, cuando se presentan como los campeones de los derechos humanos.

what there of is of jazz at its best is heavy stuff: it is small, but made of uranium

El mundo del tercer milenio seguirá siendo, muy probablemente, un mundo de violencia política y de cambios políticos violentos. Lo único que resulta inseguro es hacia dónde llevarán

Aunque el ideal terrenal del socialismo y el comunismo se haya derrumbado, los problemas que este ideal intentaba resolver permanecen: se trata de la descarada utilización social del desmesurado poder del dinero, que muchas veces dirige el curso de los acontecimientos. Y si la lección global del siglo XX no produce una seria reflexión, el inmerso torbellino rojo puede repetirse de principio a fin. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, en New York Times 28 de noviembre de 1993

En resumen, y contra lo que pudiera parecer, el siglo XX mostró que se puede gobernar contra todo el pueblo por algún tiempo, y contra una parte del pueblo todo el tiempo, pero no contra todo el pueblo todo el tiempo

She's a smart woman. I love that. Intelligence is a wonderful and powerful aphrodisiac. To me, it enhances beauty, makes an ordinary woman look like a movie star.

fear is weakness uncontrolled!

Keep a woman broke, keep her under control. Give her just enough to get by. She won't starve to death, but she'll never be able to afford to leave. That's from the handbook on how to be a pimp.

Baby, ain't no fun being a queen living in a kingless castle.

guilt force justification!

The black man has been manipulated by the offspring of the evil bastards who kidnapped and enslaved his forefathers. A black man using the white man's Bible is the best example of Stockholm syndrome to date. If blacks are in a white man's heaven, they are janitors and maids.

In this business, he who shot last died first

The gun was in Mrs. Jones's left hand. She put her right hand behind her, between my legs, then held on to my cock like it was a leash.

modern infrastructure—for reliable power, clean water, fast transit, affordable food, and resilient structures—has done more to improve public health than any other modern intervention, including scientific medicine

In civically flourishing societies, the people remember that the system is healthiest and most robust when power emerges from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down. In such societies, the people recognize that it is not only fair that power be circulated widely; it is also wise.

Which is why, from the Inca Empire to the Soviet Union, extractive societies have been prone to collapse. Power naturally flows to the top. We've established that. But where power flows to the top and stays there, without correction or recirculation, a society is likely to die a catastrophic death.

They share a vision of a society where more people are able to claim and create more power—for themselves, by themselves—against the encroachments of others. And they now share an experience that teaches them that it is both possible and necessary to create power: to activate people who very reasonably could believe that the deck is so stacked against them that there's no point in getting involved.

By deliberately withholding power, you generate more. By choosing to redirect it, you remember that the choice is yours. Such acts remind us how much dormant civic power we actually have—and how infrequently we ever activate that potential in full.

Remind yourself and others that power is in fact infinite—that we can create it where it does not exist. Our final strategy for doing that is simply this: act powerful. When we act powerful we become powerful. That plays out in the poses and stances we strike in civic life, in the art we make together in everyday life, and in the reality of minority rule.

The story of El Centro's creation and flourishing reminds us that civic power may not require a plan—but it does require a purpose.

The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany.