Tom Robbins Quotes

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.

My relationship to power and authority is that I'm all for it.

Men submit from habit to everything that seeks power.

I am a collaborator with everyone who agrees that I need to be in control. I happily collaborate with my loyalists.

Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Boys, I've just reminded Hubert that I've got his balls in my pocket.

Conformity--the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.

War and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.

Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.

The violence of our time is caused by obedience.

What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word "We.

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

Vadim was both my teacher and my husband. I placed myself entirely in his hands.

I think I'm a natural-born leader. I know how to bow down to authority if it's authority that I respect.

There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.

All men would be tyrants if they could.

He does what I have always needed to have done to me, and that is that he dominates me.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things.

I like the moment when I break a man's ego.

You have no power at all if you do not exercise constant power.

The mob is a sort of bear; while your ring is through its nose, it will even dance under your cudgel; but should the ring slip, and you lose your hold, the brute will turn and rend you.

The world is ruled by violence, or at least the imminent threat of violence. It always has been.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.