Quotes about power

“I see the truth now. We pretend that magic is the root of our pain when everything rotten in this kingdom begins and ends with us. There’s no helping it.” I clench my fist. “Amari proved that in Ibadan. This throne corrupts even the purest of hearts. As long as it exists, people will continue to tear this kingdom apart.”

All these years I thought Father was a monster, but what if ruling this kingdom forced him to act that way?

Built into any system of domination is the tendency to proclaim its own normalcy. To acknowledge resistance as a mass phenomenon is to acknowledge the possibility that something is wrong with the system.

I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.

History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.

The same thing happens to every President. People tell a chief executive what they think he wants to hear. Rosy economic reports, high popularity figures, promising international changes, you name it. There’s a competition to be the first with good news. Anyone who tells bad news tends to get weeded out—even if all the real news is bad.

Who should run the world? There’s no easy answer, no magic solution. There never is, to a really hard question.

Sometimes wealth and power merely created the desire for more of the same.

In the land of the unarmed, the man with a rock was king.

Agon wondered what god Cenaria had offended to deserve such a king.

It may be beyond your comprehension, but I can hold power without using it.

“You know,” she said, “they teach you that robots are made to serve humans. But the way they say that word ‘serve’ it sounds like ‘control.’ My father—Simon—called it ‘politician talk.’”