Groucho Marx Quotes

Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.

Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable.

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

Coercion is the basis of every law in the universe.

What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other people's decisions for them?

Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.

What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power.

People who are divided are easier to control.

It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.

The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.

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

People only respond to fear.

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!

A portion of the multitude must ever be coerced.

People are submissive to power, and few of them can be influenced by doctrines of righteousness.

If people aren't educated, they can't question. If they can't question, they can't change anything, which is great for the status quo and all the people who can question them at their own level.

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

Whenever you have people in power, they try to control people. It's not necessarily a bad thing to control people - you can control people for good, you can control people for bad, but you're gonna try and control people.

Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.

Do you mind if I don't smoke?

Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.