Quotes About Dominance

The most profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ultimately irrational ends to which they are put seem like common sense.

If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. — American Proverb

The war against the imagination is the only one the capitalists have actually managed to win.

The treasury is based upon mining, the army upon the treasury; he who has army and treasury may conquer the whole wide earth.

ancient Rome had conquered the world three times: the first time through its armies, the second through its religion, the third through its laws.91 He might have added: each time more thoroughly.

The effect, though, is that American imperial power is based on a debt that will never—can never—be repaid.

here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.

Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don't have to worry about, don't have to know about, and don't have to do.

státní aparát [...] skupina lidí, kteÃ…â"¢í si jako jediní osobují právo - alespo? tehdy, když jsou ve své oficiální roli - používat násilí.

most Amazonians don't want to give others the power to threaten them with physical injury if they don't do as they are told. Maybe we should better be asking what it says about ourselves that we feel this attitude needs any sort of explanation.

Why the West Rules – For Now

on a political level, where every arbitrary act of power tends to reinforce a feeling that it's not power, but arbitrariness—that is, freedom itself—that is the problem.

A slightly different version of the argument--this is really the core of Max Weber's reflections on the subject--is that a bureaucracy, once created, will immediately move to make itself indispensable to anyone trying to wield power, no matter what they wish to do with it. The chief way to do this is always by attempting to monopolize access to certain key types of information.

it is only by the threat of sticks, ropes, spears, and guns that one can tear people out of those endlessly complicated webs of relationship with others (sisters, friends, rivals Ã¢â'¬Â¦) that render them unique, and thus reduce them to something that can be traded.

The final victory over the Soviet Union did not really lead to the domination of "the market." More than anything, it simply cemented the dominance of fundamentally conservative managerial elites—corporate bureaucrats who use the pretext of short-term, competitive, bottom-line thinking to squelch anything likely to have revolutionary implications of any kind.

all imperial arrangements do, ultimately, rest on terror.

Political power has to be constantly recreated by persuading others to recognize one's power; to do so, one pretty much invariably has to convince them that one's power has some basis other than their recognition.

from China's point of view, this is the first stage of a very long process of reducing the United States to something like a traditional Chinese client state.

Advertising," he wrote, "now compares with such long-standing institutions as the school and the church in the magnitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast power in the shaping of popular standards and it is really one of the very limited groups of institutions which exercise social control.

But, he added, in a rare moment of self-revelation, "such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.

It was not the first time I had encountered on university campuses ignorance of Hayek and other conservative intellectuals, nor was it accidental. Such ignorance is a direct consequence of the tenured left's dominance of liberal arts institutions and its politicization of the curriculum and the faculty hiring process since the 1960s.

Extensive conquests, when pursued, must be the ruin of every free government

Nature is always too strong for principle.

I]f subjects must never resist, it follows that every prince, without any effort, policy, or violence, is at once rendered absolute and uncontrollable;