Letty Cottin Pogrebin Quotes

Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.

Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.

The Queen's intelligence network is a hell of a lot better than anyone's in this palace. Bar none. She knows everything. I don't know how she does it. And she sees everything.

Think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value of information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.

If you know someone's secret, what power does that give you? How much power does that really give you? What can you do with secrets?

The nature of honesty is that if someone has information or knows something about you that you don't want heard, then they have power over you.

Knowledge is a form of power and most institutions exhibit an understandable reluctance to dissipate this power in the absence of compensating advantages

What you know is a club for yourself, and what you don't know is a meat-ax for the other fellow.

Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitor.

Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.

The importance of discretion increases with closeness to the top of a hierarchical organization.

Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, help to support the political power. It's also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.

Because after a time having a secret and nobody knowing you have a secret us no fun. And although you dont want others to know what the secret is, you want them to at least know you have one.

Knowing things is magical, if other people don't know them.

The basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power.

All men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot.

Carlitos is amazing. He does what he wants with the Arabs. He tells them "I want to go to Buenos Aires" and they say "No, Carlitos, stay here now, we'll give you more money". And then he gets more money!

Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.

Power in the hands of the reformer is no less potentially corrupting than in the hands of the oppressor.

Today science prevails not because of its comparative merits, but because the show has been rigged in its favour... It reigns supreme because some past successes have led to institutional measures (education; role of experts; role of power groups such as the AMA) that prevent a comeback of the rivals.

It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it were on your side and not theirs.

The less the power, the greater the desire to exercise it.

...the word occult, despite conjuring images of devil worship, actually means ‘hidden’ or ‘obscured.’ In times of religious oppression, knowledge that was counterdoctrinal had to be kept hidden or ‘occult,’ and because the church felt threatened by this, they redefined anything ‘occult’ as evil, and the prejudice survived.

The issue is we're losing leverage. Governments are increasingly getting more power and we are increasingly losing our ability to control that power, and even to be aware of that power.