Georges Bataille Quotes

States are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power

...the Church is the merciless heart of the State.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race - the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.

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

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.

If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.

Then came the churches, then came the schools, then came the lawyers, then came the rules.

Autonomous state actions will regularly take forms that attempt to reinforce the authority, political longevity, and social control of the state.

Sectors of power are not going to favor the flourishing of dissidence.

religion and morality are a much better whip to keep people in submission than even the club and the gun.

Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the 'votes of the majority,' the 'will of the people,' the 'aristocracy of talents or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings' or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.

Personally I declare that I owe the Pope no other obedience than that to Antichrist.

The church must be the critic and guide of the state, and never its tool.

Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.

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

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.

The church and religion has lost tremendous power and positive power.

The thing that makes me really outraged, is the idea that the Mormon Church would presume to get involved in decisions that have little to do with Mormonism.

Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling - oh, Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it "good." He wished that government would wander off and get lost! (96)

This is the power of the powerful to define, to structure, to say, 'This is the way the world works.' It's enormous power. Among the powers of the weak, I think the first one is the power not to believe the powerful.

Religion is often politics made sacred.