Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

The Nihilistic Troll might pretend to be acting in the service of some cause or leader, but don’t be fooled. The cause and their supposedly strong convictions are simply a way to justify and provide cover for their abusive behavior.

Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn’t about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

Be the chief but never the lord.

Neil Young is my hero, and such a great example. You know what that guy has been doing for the past 40 years? Making music. That’s what that guy does. Sometimes you pay attention, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes he hands it to you, sometimes he keeps it to himself. He’s a good man with a beautiful family and wonderful life.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

I don’t mind how much my Ministers talk, so long as they do what I say.

There is only one way… to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.

Chinese people need to be controlled; otherwise, they will do whatever they want.

For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of ‚passive action,‘ the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy. Purity, in spite of outward appearances, is essentially an active virtue, because it concentrates God in us and on those who are subject to our influence.

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

Kids are watching us. I experience it every single day. They hang on my every word, what I wear, what I say.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.

These people are very unskilled in arms… with 50 men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.

War should only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits.

It confuses me and disappoints me when somebody says, ‚What does he do? What does he do?‘ My records are some of the biggest anthems ever. What do you think, they magically just appear? Obama walked out to my record.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

People are terrified of me, and I want them to be.

If I’m going to get you to do stuff, I need to lead you. I can’t just order you to do it.

You do indeed have a past, but not now! And, yes, you have a future, but not now! You can consume your now with thoughts of ‚then‘ and ‚maybe,‘ but that will keep you from the inner peace you could experience.

Even if the politics needed doesn’t exist today, we still need to use our voices to make sure that the people in power are focused on the right things. Because this is a democracy, and in a democracy, people are the ones who run the country.

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it.

Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by the law.

Our combat mission is ending, but our commitment to Iraq’s future is not.

I had faith in Israel before it was established, I have in it now. I believe it has a glorious future before it – not just another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.

Power and speed be hands and feet.

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.

There was a time Michael Jackson couldn’t get his video on MTV because he was considered to be ‚urban.‘ The Michael Jackson. So I literally have to be the Michael Jackson of apparel in order to break down the doors for everyone who will come after I’m gone, after I’m dead.

Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.

If you’re going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet’s corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

In a time not distant, it will be possible to flash any image formed in thought on a screen and render it visible at any place desired. The perfection of this means of reading thought will create a revolution for the better in all our social relations.

The future of advertising is the Internet.

‚Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion.

Power is a complicated word and can take many forms.

Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

I think it’s my responsibility, as a person of influence… to sometimes try to do what I can.

I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?

Once I knew only darkness and stillness… my life was without past or future… but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.

Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we’ve ever known.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

Our focus needs to be less on what our legacy’s going to be or how we can control each other and more how we can give to each other.