Power Relations Quotes

#1. Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations.

Eduardo Galeano

#2. IDEOLOGY IS A CERTAIN UNIQUE EXPERIENCE OF THE UNIVERSE AND YOUR PLACE IN IT, TO PUT IT IN STANDARD TERMS, WHICH SERVES THE PRODUCTION OF THE EXISTING POWER RELATIONS AND BLAH BLAH BLAH.

Slavoj Zizek

#3. Others, including those with a social theory influence, talk about securitization primarily in terms of practices, context, and power relations that characterize the construction of threat images.

Thierry Balzacq

#4. There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations

Michel Foucault

#5. Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.

Charles W. Mills

#6. I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

Deborah Eisenberg

#7. The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#8. Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice is always an agon, a conflict, and to refuse this assertion is to consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.

Simon Critchley

#9. Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.

Sheila Jeffreys

#10. Power relations between men and women must change profoundly, men must be partners in the pursuit of gender equality, in their decision-making roles, as heads of state, CEOs, religious and cultural leaders, and as partners and parents.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

#11. The thing I am most interested in is power relations - it is so easy to imagine that the other person is living a perfect life.

Miranda July

#12. Obama's failure to close Guantanamo is yet another instance where the rhetoric of democratic and constitutional rights proved not useful for his international relations, relations which are always pursued in ways that continue to link and fortify securitarian power with the opening of new markets.

Judith Butler

#13. The possibility of somebody emerging as a nuclear power or events happening that surprise us on the nuclear age is still a possibility. It always will be because there's an awful lot going on behind the scenes. Our intelligence just has to get better on that score. Peter Goss

Joel C. Rosenberg

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

Michel Foucault

#15. It is a harmful feeling, because it disturbs advantageous and joyous, peaceful relations with other peoples, and above all produces that governmental organization under which power may fall, and does fall, into the, hands of the worst men.

Leo Tolstoy

#16. The power of a network can be reduced to it's simplest form in 'I know someone who knows someone who knows someone.

Michele Jennae

#17. The "compleat diplomat" of the future should remain cognizant of realism's emphasis on the inescapable role of power, keep liberalism's awareness of domestic forces in mind, and occasionally reflect on constructivism's vision of change.

Stephen M. Walt

#18. Out of the Indian approach to life there came a great freedom, an intense and absorbing respect for life, enriching faith in a Supreme Power, and principles of truth, honesty, generosity, equity, and brotherhood as a guide to mundane relations.

Black Elk

#19. P6-the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within sociey.

C. Wright Mills

#20. Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

Adrienne Rich

#21. Engaging Iran won't guarantee improved U.S.-Iranian relations or a more stable Gulf region. But not engaging means more of the same.

Samantha Power

#22. The mentality of being the super power globally or regionally has contributed strongly to the development of very negative aspects to the political cohabitation the countries of the region than proving the capability of producing solutions that would meet the needs of the public.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

#23. all relations of power rest on one thing, a contract between the leader and the followers such that the followers believe it is in their interest to follow the leader. No man can compel another - except at knifepoint - to do what he does not want to do."17

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#24. Be careful in your relations with those in power; they draw you close or allow you to approach them only when they need you. They are your friends when your friendship is useful to them and affords them pleasure, but they forget you when you are in trouble.
Elie Wiesel quoting Rabban Gamliel

Elie Wiesel

#25. The balance of power between the sexes had been destabilized, and relations between mothers and their children transformed from a natural and accepted one to a mere option.

Peter Hitchens

#26. He was one of those people in New York who was purported to "know everybody". "Knowing everybody" is a phrase that denotes not having many relations with people but having relations with a few people generally thought to be significant and powerful.

Siri Hustvedt

#27. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.

Walter Rauschenbusch

#28. In the long run, even a tyrannical government only has the power that the people confer on it and coming to understand history is the beginning of making things right.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

#29. At the same time, as social beings, we are moved in the relations with our fellow beings by such feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for power, pity, and so on.

Albert Einstein

#30. Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.

Alan Keyes

#31. He who wishes to serve his country must have not only the power to think, but the will to act

Plato

#32. And I became fixated, too, upon Katharine Hepburn's famous Fred and Ginger theory: He gives her class, she gives him sex. Was this a general rule? Did all friendships - all relations - involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power?

Zadie Smith

#33. When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men. By political power we refer to the mutual relations of control among the holders of public authority and between the latter and the people at large.

Hans J. Morgenthau

#34. In our international relations, we Chinese people should get rid of great-power chauvinism resolutely, thoroughly, wholly and completely.

Mao Zedong

#35. We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

Milan Kundera

#36. A man's true estate of power and riches is to be in himself; not in his dwelling or position or external relations, but in his own essential character.

Henry Ward Beecher

#37. That Amendment requires the state to be a neutral in its relations with groups of religious believers and nonbelievers; it does not require the state to be their adversary. State power is no more to be used so as to handicap religions than it is to favor them.

Hugo Black

#38. I propose that there is another kind of power based not on resources, things, or attributes, but rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue of group life.

Frances Fox Piven

#39. International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power

Hans J. Morgenthau

#40. critical pedagogy illuminates how classroom learning embodies selective values, is entangled with relations of power, entails judgments about what knowledge counts, legitimates specific social relations, defines agency in particular ways, and always presupposes a particular notion of the future.

Henry A. Giroux

#41. In sexual relations, a connection between solar plexus chakras indicates shared power in the relationship.

Brownell Landrum

#42. The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

Virginia Woolf

#43. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations.

J. William Fulbright

#44. The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship [in the Soviet Union], if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.

Leon Trotsky

#45. Everything is habit with men, everything even in their social and political relations. Habit is the great motive-power.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#46. Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite.

Michel Foucault

#47. In other words, the capacity to exercise power is always a reflection of one's position in social relations.

James W. Messerschmidt

#48. A basic language-literacy of Nature is falling from us. And what is being lost along with this literacy is something perhaps even more valuable: a kind of language-magic, the power that certain words possess to enchant our imaginative relations with Nature and landscape.

Robert Macfarlane

#49. To operate within the matrix of
power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.

Judith Butler