O. Henry Quotes

Our image has undergone change from David fighting Goliath to being Goliath.

I am now The Establishment. There's nothing I can do about it.

… relative positions have a way of changing. When the underdog becomes top dog, he is hardly likely to go on considering himself bound by a bad bargain he entered into unwillingly.

It's strange. At some point in your career, the situation between yourself and the camera reverses. For a certain number of years, you court it and you need it, but ultimately, it needs you more, and it's a bit like a relationship. The minute that happens, it turns you off... and it does feel like it is taking something from you.

Years ago, the NFL influenced what happened in college. It's the other way around now.

Care, admitted as guest, quickly turns to be master.

The expectation of my life was that I might be able to work for some good white folks. Now I got some good white folks working for me.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

Being made merely in the image of God but not otherwise resembling him enough to be mistaken by anybody but a very near sighted person.

We live in a wondrous time in which the strong is weak because of his moral scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.

He is sometimes slave who should be master; and sometimes master who should be slave.

I control the conditions so my testers become my testees.

It's true that in chess as in politics, fund-raising and glad-handing matter.

For one to be free there must be at least two. Freedom signifies a social relation, an asymmetry of social conditions: essentially it implies social difference--it presumes and implies the presence of social division. Some can be free only in so far as there is a form of dependence they can aspire to escape.

The Islamophobia phobes, (ph) the writers and the editors and the talking heads who deny an existence of evil while blaming those who speak up. There no difference - different than the apologists for communism. As communism killed millions, they, they denied it.

Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.

People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.

When you're the person who's kind of in charge of everything a lot of the time, it's sometimes nice to get bossed around. It's sometimes nice to have somebody say, "This is what I want you to do" and to stretch your abilities.

I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force.

Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don’t think they can become men

When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?

Common people, whether lords or shop-keepers, are slow to understand that possession, whether in the shape of birth or lands or money or intellect, is a small affair in the difference between men.

A new world order is in the making, and it is up to us to prepare ourselves that we may take our rightful place in it.

We came to enjoy; we are being enjoyed. We came to rule; we are being ruled. We came to work; we are being worked. All the time, we find that. And this comes into every detail of our life.

I spoke at a woman's club in Philadelphia yesterday and a young lady said to me afterwards, "Well, that sounds very nice, but don't you think it is better to be the power behind the throne?" I answered that I had not had much experience with thrones, but a woman who has been on a throne, and who is now behind it, seems to prefer to be on the throne.