Sherman Alexie Quotes

What I'd really like to control is not machines, but people.

An undeniable truth is that while Obama and Pelosi and George Soros and whoever else tell you and me to get off oil, they won't - they're the elites. They're smarter, they're running the world, and they have to be able to get to where they have to go.

Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.

The world is ruled by force, not by opinion; but opinion uses force.

Most human beings, though in varying degrees, desire to control, not only their own lives but also the lives of others

Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.

Force rules the world-not opinion; but it is opinion that makes use of force.

The hand that controls the supper dish rules the world!

Opinion is, as it were, the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant.

This isn't a particularly novel observation, but the world is full of people who think they can manipulate the lives of others merely by getting a law passed.

The rules your parents teach you to live by are very different than the rules the world actually runs by. Most of the conventional wisdom is not only wrong, it's a lie told to us by people who want to control us. It doesn't help us, it helps them. Pretty much everything we're told as children (and adults, really) by the established power structures in our lives are made up fairytales us to reinforce that control: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, fat-free frozen dinners, religion, and metering lights on the highway--the list goes on

That's how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other.

I think that our own crisis of democracy is in its own way affecting our ability to leverage in the same way that we used to in the world.

I have discovered that a famed familiarity in great ones is a note of certain usurpation on the less; for great and popular men feign themselves to be servants to others to make those slaves to them.

The world's always been run by women.

Men control the world, but women control the men.

Nobody that I know really likes the feeling of having no power and not being able to influence people. But most of us aren't too conscious of what we are trying to do and get that control and that power so people end up sort of playing all kinds of unconscious manipulative games or they're sort of half aware, they have an idea of a strategy or goal they want to use and they think about it. But then in the heat of the moment, it kind of all flies out the window.

Without followers, evil cannot spread.

Some forms of truth are really forms of social power and oppression.

An expert is someone who articulates the needs of those in power.

The sort of morality which the priests inculcate is a very subtle policy, far finer than the politicians', and the world is very successfully ruled by them as the policemen.

Donald Trump is an instrument of a Power bigger than himself, and bigger than all of the power that's in America today, or in the world today.

POWER: The ability to make our fellow humans squirm, sweat and stammer on command. Often regarded as an aphrodisiac; actually a potent laxative that, whenever ingested by people in high places, causes everyone below to run for cover.

The power to do things for people is also the power to do things to people.

In real life, what scares me is politicians, corporations and people that think they know what the world should be.