In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Desiderius Erasmus
#480
Nobody in history has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.
Assata Shakur
#475
It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
Michael Foucault
#467
The almost unsolvable task is to not let oneself be made stupid, neither by the power of the others nor by the own powerlessness.
T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia
#455
If people base their identity on identifying with authority, freedom causes anxiety. They must then conceal the victim in themselves by resorting to violence against others.
Arno Gruen
#443
The proletarian revolution is not simply the vanquishing of capitalist power. It is the rise of the whole working people out of dependence and ignorance into independence and clear consciousness of how to make their life.
Anton Pannekoek
#423
Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. (…) But there’s also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population — to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don’t interfere with decision-making.
Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power
#415
We learn to be racist, therefore we can learn not to be racist. Racism is not genetical. It has everything to do with power.
Jane Elliott
#412
There exists today widespread propaganda which asserts that socialism is dead. But if to be a socialist is to be a person convinced that the words “the common good” and “social justice” actually mean something; if to be a socialist is to be outraged at the contempt in which millions and millions of people are held by those in power, by “market forces,” by international financial institutions; if to be a socialist is to be a person determined to do everything in his or her power to alleviate these unforgivably degraded lives, then socialism can never be dead because these asportations never die.
Harold Pinter
#407
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Seneca the Younger
#404
The more clearly oppositional movements recognize that their central objective must be to confront the class power that has been so effectively restored under neoliberalization, the more they will likely themselves cohere.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
