Dhirubhai Ambani Quotes

Challenging vested interests requires a government's full commitment.

Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.

To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.

I think the American people can change Washington. But I think that it is not going to change, because somebody from on high directs that change.

This is the power of the powerful to define, to structure, to say, 'This is the way the world works.' It's enormous power. Among the powers of the weak, I think the first one is the power not to believe the powerful.

Politics are about power; we cannot evade that truth or its consequences. We dream of a better world but it is in Utopia - that is, nowhere.

When people with power see things happen of which they disapprove, they drop bombs and send in tanks. When people without power see things happen of which they disapprove, they smash store windows, blow themselves up in crowded places, and fly planes into buildings. The fact that both methods have proved remarkably unsuccessful at changing things doesn't stop people from going on in the same way.

And ordering me around is exactly the wrong way to make me do what you want.

The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.

Any reasonable ruler would have the expectation and the demand the other way round.

Neoliberalism eats its own children. Disposability is central to how neoliberalism functions. I would not like to romanticize that, though, by suggesting that it creates dreamers. I would like to suggest that the radical imagination is so powerful, when employed collectively, that people will attempt to find solutions in ways that challenge the very conditions that made them disposable. That's where this sort of thing becomes interesting. We need to be careful about the dreaming quality here.

And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

Politics is social work with power.

Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have.

Liberals despise the rule of law because it interferes with their ability to rule by mob. They love to portray themselves as the weak taking on the powerful. But it is the least powerful who suffer the most once the rule of law is gone.

If scientists and scholars were to become "collectively self-organised and consciously activist" today, they would probably devote themselves to service to state and private power. Those who have different goals should (and do) become organized and activist.

Politics is an obsolete way of doing things. Although it was good a hundred years ago, it has no place in today's high tech society.

If one meets a powerful person - Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates - ask them five questions: 'What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?' If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power.

The tension between the governed and the governing is what makes the world go 'round. It's not love, it's that tension, because that tension exists in love affairs. The whole idea of control is at the heart of human relationships. Control and resistance to control.

The system concedes nothing without demand, for it formulates its very method of operation on the basis that the ignorant will learn to know, the child will grow into an adult and therefore demands will begin to be made. It gears itself to resist demands in whatever way it sees fit.

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

The Orange Revolution was a powerful example of democracy around the world. The people of Ukraine are continuing to shape their own future.