Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
—Paul Valéry
I want to put a ding in the universe.
—Steve Jobs
I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
—Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending
Without your wounds where would your power be? The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken in the wheels of living. In love's service, only the wounded soldiers can serve.
—Thornton Wilder
An enormous conflict between words and deeds is prevalent today: everyone talks about freedom, democracy, justice, human rights, about peace and saving the world from nuclear apocalypse; and at the same time, everyone, more or less, consciously or unconsciously, serves those values and ideals only to the extent necessary to serve himself and his "worldly" interests, personal interests, group interests, power interests, property interests, and state or great-power interests.… So the power structures apparently have no other choice than to sink deeper into this vicious maelstrom, and contemporary people apparently have no other choice than to wait around until the final inhibition drops away. But who should begin? Who should break this vicious circle? Responsibility cannot be preached but only borne, and the only possible place to begin is with oneself.
—Vaclav Havel
When ideas go unexamined and unchallenged for a long enough time, certain things happen. They become mythological, and they become very, very powerful. They create conformity. They intimidate.
—E. L. Doctorow
It's always been and always will be the same in the world: the horse does the work, and the coachman is tipped.
—Unknown
Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and this will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.
—Frederick Douglass
My wish is to ride the tempest, tame the waves, kill the sharks.… I will not resign myself to the usual lot of women who bow their heads and become concubines.
—Trieu Thi Trinh
If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?
—Linda Ellerbee
If I had ever learned to type, I never would have made brigadier general.
—Elizabeth Hoisington, one of the first two female U.S. Army officers to attain the rank
Perhaps that is what love is: the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.
—Phyllis Rose
Romania had been under communist rule since 1945, but it was after Ceausescu came to power in 1965 that life really began to deteriorate.… Then, one night in the late 1980s, a group of men dressed as street sweepers draped the statue of Lenin in Bucharest with big truck tires and set them on fire. It was a bold and daring act in a country where, it was said, for every Romanian on the street there were two secret police officers. The next morning traffic was detoured while workers from nearby factories were brought in to clean the statue with razor blades. That day I realized that change was possible.
—Florin Ion Firimita
It was thanks to women like Eppie that this moment in history could exist—a moment when a woman could be a serious contender for the presidency of the United States. In the 1970s Eppie had defied her husband by helping to found a Planned Parenthood branch in her town. She'd started a women's empowerment group before most of us even knew what empowerment meant.
—Mally Z. Ray
She had risen and was walking about the room, her fat, worn face sharpening with a sort of animal alertness into power and protection. The claws that hide in every maternal creature slipped out of the fur of good manners.
—Margaret Deland