Barbara Kruger Quotes

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

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.

Power is being able to affect the hegemony of existing systems.

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

Comedy often comes at the expense of others, and to do that smartly, you don't want to make fun of vulnerable people. You want to make fun of people in power, and so you need to really understand the dynamics of power.

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.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

It has always seemed to me that those who are without power, who have to create their own in a makeshifit way, know more about life than those who govern.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

If we accept the rule of those who think they are the bosses and lords of Mexico, nothing will change for the people on the bottom.

People in power need to control others in order to maintain power. One of the ways to do that is to take that which is threatening and demonize it.

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being.

The primary object of every elite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power and privilege.

There is no more contemptible poison than power over one's fellow men.

The natural course of power is to make the many slaves to the few.

Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.

Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

How many, even of the better sort, would choose to be slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?