Quotes about Power

If wealth and might are to be performed, great wealth and great might must be performed brilliantly.

Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. Original thinkers can be suppressed through execution and exile, or they can be encouraged through subsidy and flattery to praise the society's heroes. Alexander and Napoleon took their poets and their scholars into battle with them, saving themselves the nuisance of repression and along the way drawing ever larger audiences to their triumph.

A culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths.

The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition.

Religion ceases to be religion when its poetic authority is recast as civic authority.

War is not an act of unchecked ruthlessness but a declared contest between bounded societies, or states. If a state has no enemies it has no boundaries.

Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner's prize is the defeated opponent.

In art, the Trinity is expressed in the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy, and the Creative Power—the first imagining of the work, then the making incarnate of the work, and third the meaning of the work.

That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed.

We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity. Incidentally, this is the weakness of most "edifying" or "propaganda" literature. There is no diversity. The Energy is active only in one part of the whole, and in consequence the wholeness is destroyed and the Power diminished. You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

The agents of the miraculous which the novelist has at his command are, roughly speaking, conversion and coincidence;