Thomas Sowell - Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades

Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.

Topics

Citations

Sowell, Thomas. Basic Economics. Basic Books, 2000.

Related Quotes

Erich Fromm

Authority is not a quality one person 'has', in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.

John Stuart Mill

The people who exercise the power are not always the same people over whom it is exercised.

Nez Perce Indian Tribe

White men have too many chiefs.

In the Nez Perce and most other Native American societies, there were Chiefs and occasionally, for special circumstances, War Chiefs, but few if any other officials, thus producing a very flat, egalitarian society. But the whites had many layers of bureaucrats and petty officials. Governors, The President, Members of Congress, State Legislators, Generals, Sheriffs, Indian Agents, tax collectors, and the like. On the Papago Indian reservation, there was great difficulty on a construction project as even the concept of a work foreman was an uncomfortable notion. No Papago wanted to be directed or ordered about by anyone else even on a work gang. And do no one wanted to assume a position of authority or be responsive to a fellow other than the Chief and the tribal elders.

Alexander Pope

Order is Heaven's first law, and this confessed, Some are, and must be greater than the rest -

Kehinde Wiley

The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it.

Julia Hartz

Humans want to know the hierarchy; it's important for there to be one leader.

Kanye West

Cause we they leaders, and they the followers
And we the nut-busters and they the swallowers'

Ely Culbertson

A deck of cards is built like the purest of hierarchies, with every card a master to those below it, a lackey to those above it.

Vaclav Havel

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

Tom G. Palmer

If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command?

Tupac Shakur

I think I'm a natural-born leader. I know how to bow down to authority if it's authority that I respect.

Hugh Grant

And I particularly like the whole thing of being boss. Boss and employee... It's the slave quality that I find very alluring.

Jean de La Fontaine

One often has need of one, inferior to himself.

Arundhati Roy

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.