Rich Turner Quotes

Wild beasts hate nets, and people hate their superiors.

The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar.

I'm fed up with being bossed around.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

Master of the universe but not of myself, I am the only rebel against my absolute power.

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.

Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority!

Power abdicates only under stress of counter-power.

The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.

Force, no matter how concealed, begets resistance.

Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no men can be trusted to look after anyone else.

Every organism, every human being, must conquer or serve.

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

To repress rebellion is to maintain the status quo, a condition which binds the mortal creature in a state of intellectual or physical slavery. But it is impossible to chain man merely by slaving his body; the mind also must be held, and to accomplish this, fear is the accepted weapon. The common man must fear life, fear death, fear God, fear the Devil, and fear most the overlords, the keepers of his destiny.

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.

In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt.

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

For me, a lot of my work has dealt with what it means to be at the center of the universe and how alienating and kind of seductive it is. A lot of my work is very aggressive and very visual, but at the same time, it has a lot of tension in it and makes you kind of uncomfortable sometimes.

Power is never so overwhelming that there's no room for resistance.

I wouldn't play together with someone who likes to control everything like me.

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

Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.