Political Power Quotes

“The President in particular is very much a figurehead — he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had — he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“It can be difficult to speak truth to power. Circumstances, however, have made doing so increasingly necessary.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“I am the interpretation of the prophet
I am the artist in the coffin
I am the brave flag stained with blood
I am the wounds overcome
I am the dream refusing to sleep
I am the bare-breasted voice of liberty
I am the comic the insult and the laugh
I am the right the middle and the left
I am the poached eggs in the sky
I am the Parisian streets at night
I am the dance that swings till dawn
I am the grass on the greener lawn
I am the respectful neighbour and the graceful man
I am the encouraging smile and the helping hand
I am the straight back and the lifted chin
I am the tender heart and the will to win
I am the rainbow in rain
I am the human who won’t die in vain
I am Athena of Greek mythology
I am the religion that praises equality
I am the woman of stealth and affection
I am the man of value and compassion
I am the wild horse ploughing through
I am the shoulder to lean onto
I am the Muslim the Jew and the Christian
I am the Dane the French and the Palestinian
I am the straight the square and the round
I am the white the black and the brown
I am the free speech and the free press
I am the freedom to express
I will die for my right to be all the above here mentioned
And should threat encounter I’ll pull my pencil”
― Mie Hansson, Where Pain Thrives

“People turned against each other cannot turn against those responsible.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“The more we're thrown into conflict with each other through engineered distrust, the less able we are to unite against those responsible.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.”
― Wendell Berry

“Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political power.”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“...The strange thing, you know, is that Stalin openly admired Ivan the Terrible. Two leaders who were willing to crush and kill their own people-to do anything necessary- in order to consolidate their power...Can you imagine a world in which Stalin could live for five hundred years...or perhaps forever?”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“And the extraordinary thing is that according to these texts all powers, all the power and glory of the kingdoms, all that has to do with politics and political authority, belongs to the devil. It has all been given to him and he gives it to whom he wills. Those who hold political power receive it from him and depend upon him. (It is astonishing that in the innumerable theological discussions of the legitimacy of political power, no one has ever adduced these texts! [Matthew 4:8-9; Luke 4:6-7]) This fact is no less important than the fact that Jesus rejects the devil's offer. Jesus does not say to the devil: It is not true. You do not have power over kingdoms and states. He does not dispute this claim. He refuses the offer of power because the devil demands that he should fall down before him. This is the sole point when he says: 'You shall worship the Lord your God and you shall serve him, only him' (Matthew 4:10). We may thus say that among Jesus' immediate followers and in the first Christian generation political authorities - what we call the state - belonged to the devil and those who held power received it from him.”
― Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity

“It is significant that modern believers in power are in complete accord with the philosophy of the only great thinker who ever attempted to derive public good from private interest and who, for the sake of private good, conceived and outlined a Commonwealth whose basis and ultimate end is the accumulation of power. Hobbes, indeed, is the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim....
.... The consistency of this conclusion is in no way altered by the remarkable fact that for some three hundred years there was neither a sovereign who would "convert this Truth of Speculation into the Utility of Practice," nor a bourgeoisie politically conscious and economically mature enough openly to adopt Hobbes's philosophy of power.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“When the sun goes down, the moon becomes the king of the sky.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“You are looking at this wrong. You think I hold my territory by the might of my fist. But that's not it. I hold my territory by consent of the governed. I think it is a very American concept, which might be why you never looked for it."
— Adam Hauptman, Columbia Basin Pack Alpha, to Iacopo (Jacob) Bonarata, Lord of the Night (master vampire of Milan)”
― Patricia Briggs, Silence Fallen

“Quando i giornali dipendono dalla pubblicità, e la pubblicità è in mano a chi ha il potere politico, come puoi essere libero? Quando i giornali sono posseduti dalle grandi aziende contro le quali non potrai mai scrivere e che hanno i loro interessi politici, come fai a fare del vero giornalismo?”
― Tiziano Terzani

“Democracy gives us citizens a measure of political power. That power comes with a responsibility to foster a culture that makes it possible to live and work well together for the well-being of all.”
― Diane Kalen-Sukra, Save Your City: How Toxic Culture Kills Community & What to Do About It

“Proximity to power is its own kind of education. It shapes who you are and what you desire in life. A thirst for political power — and sometimes, obtaining that power — begets more than corruption: It often involves sexual immorality, degraded moral judgment and financial malpractice. Power never affects just one area of people’s lives; it leads them to believe they can determine right and wrong for themselves. And it never affects just those individuals.”
― Kaitlyn Schiess

“Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Individuals watching Yiannopoulos on YouTube do not have the same political potential as when they are physically grouped.”
― Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook

“It takes thousands of people to turn an illegal political order into a democratic injustice. And as it happens, a huge portion of those people are civil servants. So, if even a handful of civil servants stand strong, responsible and conscientious, then no politician has the power in his pea-brain to do injustice to the people.”
― Abhijit Naskar, When Humans Unite: Making A World Without Borders

“Having known every president since Harry Truman - as Murdoch took frequent opportunities to point out - and, he conjectured, as many heads of state as anyone living, Murdock believed he understood better than younger men, even seventy-year-old Trump, that political power was fleeting. (This was in fact the same message he had imparted to Barack Obama.) A president really had only, max, six months to make an impact on the public and set his agenda, and he'd be lucky to get six months. After that it was just putting out fires and battling the opposition.”
― Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

“People are always asking me why I chose Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson to write about. Well, I must say I never thought of my books as the stories of Moses or Johnson. I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man. From the very start, I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times—particularly the force that is political power.”
― Robert A. Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing

“Political power or whatever else has no colour; it becomes coloured by your constitutional character and attitude.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Insomnia : I really don’t know who suffers from it the more — the man in power or the man who desperately wishes to be in power.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“Rulers only have office. The people have power.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu