Andrew O'Hagan Quotes

When you're interviewing someone, you're in control. When you're being interviewed, you think you're in control, but you're not.

Few great men would have got past personnel.

Power says if you are a committee chairman, your idea is good only because you have got power.

What is 'power' anyway? Power is an ego trip. Power is a way to rise yourself up by lowering others, and I want nothing of it.

Power is all. Another falsification; I do not tell how I gain or maintain it. I only record the ginger stroll through the vaguely fetid garden of its rewards.

Power positions do not yield to arguments, however rationally and morally valid, but only to superior power.

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

Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.

To me, the movie is about power.

Power is as power does.

The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessary than liberty but more dangerous.

Once you have hierarchy you need rules to protect and administer it, and then you need law and the enforcement of the rules, and you end up with some kind of chain of command or system of order that destroys relationship rather than promotes it. Hierarchy imposes laws and rules and you end up missing the wonder of relationship that we intended for you.

Everyone is a master and servant.

Power is what men seek, and any group that gets it will abuse it. It is the same story.

more and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.

There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey.

Resistance - that is the distinction of the slave. Let your distinction be obedience. Let your commanding itself be obeying!

It is monstrous that the feet should direct the head.

All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles,and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.

If absolute sovereignty be not necessary in a State, how comes it to be so in a family?

Wherever there is power there is age.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

Colin Powell's committed to come into the house of the master. When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.

Obedience alone gives the right to command.