Quotes About Power

Our Western society is showing its technological muscles in ever more threatening ways, but the experience of fear, anxiety and even despair has increased in equal proportion. Indeed, the paradox is that the powerful giants feel as powerless as a new-born babe.

What Western society teaches us is that if you get enough money, power, and beautiful people to have sex with, that's going to bring you happiness. That's what every commercial, every magazine, music, movie teaches us. That's a fallacy.

Today the Western powers and media want to domesticate us like sheep, to keep us tame and domesticated.

Grossing Out dealt with the western nations selling arms to the Third World and exploiting these countries.

The People's Republic of China has not yet reached the military might of the Soviet Empire. It requires a little more time and a little more infusion of Western aid, loans, technology and the hard currency of our tourists.

The Italian gangster thing has become a form of the modern-day Western.

The years between 1800 and 1825 were distinguished, so far as our domestic development was concerned, by the growth of the Western pioneer Democracy in power and self-consciousness.

Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures.

The Chinese state is constructed in an entirely different way from western states. Unlike European states, for over a millennium the Chinese state has not been obliged to compete for power with rivals such as the church, the aristocracy or merchants.

Western powers remain imprisoned by the idea that the world is a dangerous place, that it needs to be managed, and that they are called upon to do the managing.

Western countries are thoroughly accustomed to being the centre of global attention, which they have come to regard as their natural birthright. Not so China. It was thwarted in its attempt to hold the 2000 Olympics, which, as a result of American-led pressure, was awarded to Sydney.

Museums are western inventions where the rich and the powerful or the government and the state tend to exhibit the signs and symbol and images of their culture.

Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office.

Margaret Thatcher's government redistributed money from rich to poor. And that's the nature of a modern western democracy.

Although China is not so wealthy and powerful as the West, her people of whatever condition - rich or poor, high or low - all enjoy a perfect freedom and a happy life. Not so all the inhabitants of Western lands.

The habit of collecting, of attachment to things, is an essential human trait. But Western civilization put collecting on a pedestal by inventing museums. Museums are about representing power. It could be the king's power or, later, people's power.

Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the 'cities of the world', then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute 'the rural areas of the world'.

Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions: Western Europe and East Asia.

A powerful person is equally cool with their flaws and things that aren't powerful about them at all.

Belief is such a powerful thing - but because it is, it can also be very destructive and it's very easily manipulated.

All I've ever wanted to be is a strong, powerful, beautiful black woman.

It is a crime against the State to be powerful enough to commit one.

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.

When I heard Grateful Dead music, I knew that it was the most powerful force on the planet.