Janet Frame Quotes

The people may be made to follow a path of action, but they may not be made to understand it.

Once a person insists on how you are to think he immediately begins to insist on how you are to behave.

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

You know, you can't make the people do what you want them to do.

If you think that by threatening me you can get me to do what you want... well, that's where you're right. But - and I am only saying this because I care - there's a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Powerlessness also corrupts.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

… the tools of despotism and corruption

You must labor until we have dominion over the minds and bodies of every important person in your nation.

The path of freedom is blocked much more by those who wish to obey than by those who wish to command.

Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.

Arriane sized her up, tapping one finger against her lips. "Perfect," she said, stepping forward to loop her arm through Luce's. "I was just thinking I could really use a new slave.

No, that nurse ain't some kinda monster chicken, buddy, what she is is a ball-cutter. I've seen a thousand of 'em, old and young, men and women. Seen 'em all over the country and in the homes- people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to. And the best way to do this, to get you to knuckle under, is to weaken you by gettin' you where it hurts the worst.

Harassment is about power---the undue exercise of power by a superior over a subordinate.

Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

Beware the tyranny of the weak. They just suck you dry.

Once they get their hooks into you, you're a dead pigeon.

Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.

Give a man a free hand and he'll try to put it all over you.

The concept of power we admire is power over someone else.

A good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection.

You carry forever the fingerprint that comes from being under someone's thumb.