power manipulation Quotes

The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.

Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.

Beware the abuse of Power. Both by those we disagree with, as well as those we may agree with

People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.

The ruling class is the rich. . . . And those people are so able to manipulate our democracy that they really control the democracy.

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

The corporations plainly want academic scholarship to create a web of mystification that will avoid any public awareness of the way in which power actually functions in the society, and the faculty has caught the message and they do it magnificently.

The purpose of bread and circuses is, as Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, to distract, to divert emotional energy towards the absurd and the trivial and the spectacle while you are ruthlessly stripped of power.

When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.

In the ideal socialist state, power will not attract power freaks. People who make decisions will show no slightest bias towards their own interests. There will be no way for a clever man to bend the institutions to serve his own ends. And the rivers will run uphill.

Control the coinage and the courts — let the rabble have the rest.

History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.

One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.

In every society in human history, including the United States, those in power seek to imbue themselves with the attributes of religion and patriotism as a way of getting greater support for their policy and insulating themselves from any criticism.

Confusion has become a state of mind, more of less; we're trained to be confused. Quite simply, the people in power are keeping us down, keeping us docile and keeping us consuming with this confusion. It's a cultural confusion and it is deliberate.

Power manipulates the innocent and terror is born.

Those in power always try to distort reality, to suit their needs and keep things safe.

Challenging power structures from the inside, working the cracks within the system, however, requires learning to speak multiple languages of power convincingly.

If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged.

Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation.

It is incumbent on a great nation to remain confident, if it wishes to remain free. We need not be ignorant to real threats to our safety, against which we must remain vigilant. We need only to banish to the ash heap of history the notion that we ought to be ruled by our fears and those who use them to enhance their own power.

What we're doing is saying what happens with the establishment and how are we as ordinary human beings are used as pawns. What do we really know about what goes on! We think we are a democracy.... Are we? I'm not so sure.

Empires are synonymous with centralized if occasionally schismatized hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through usually a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society's information dissemination systems and its lesser as a rule nominally independent power systems. In short, it's all about dominance.

People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.