Romesh Gunesekera Quotes

Politics and power is a realm of relative influence.

The politicians think the journalists have power, the journalists think bankers have power, bankers think lawyers have power. The truth is, nobody has power.

The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Society receives its momentum from power.

I have several times suggested that what I call the “Establishment” in this country is today more powerful than ever before. By “Establishment” I do not mean only the centers of official power – though they are certainly part of it – but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised ... the “Establishment” can be seen at work in the activities of, not only the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Earl Marshal, but of such lesser mortals as the Chairman of the Arts Council, the Director-General of the BBC, and even the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, not to mention dignitaries like Lady Violet Bonham Carter.

The people who exercise the power are not always the same people over whom it is exercised.

Only powerful people have liberty.

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

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

Culture follows power.

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

The concept of power we admire is power over someone else.

The power to define the situation is the ultimate power.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

Authority is something from which we are constantly subtracting, of which there remains always a residue, and which we attempt to make smaller and smaller.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

Power is not just political. It can be cultural; it can be spiritual.

Like most animals, we're wired to associate height with power.

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.