Power Relations Quotes

Community begins in mystery and ends in administration. Leaders move away from people and into paper.

I admire men of character and I judge character not by how men deal with their superiors, but mostly how they deal with their subordinates. And that, to me, is where you find out what the character of a man is.

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

Real politics are the possession and distribution of power.

A market is not politically neutral; its existence creates economic power which one actor can use against another.

We should not be content to say that power has a need for such-and-such a discovery, such-and-such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. ... The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power. ... It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power.

I have this rule. It's called 'Top Dog-Underdog:' Underdog gets to make fun of Top Dog, but Top Dog can't make fun of Underdog. But you know what? You get Top Dog, you get to be Top Dog. Congratulations! And that dynamic happens not just in race but in many different ways. It's like the male-female dynamic.

Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

The American revolution not only cost Britain the 13 colonies but also forced it to rethink the slave trade and slavery, and influenced its power relations in Asia and the Pacific.

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations

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.

Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation that exists between the expression of someone's will and the execution of that will by others.

Power is the relation of a given person to other persons, in which the more this person expresses opinions, theories and justifications of the collective action the less is his participation in that action.

Foucault is one of many who want a new conception of how power and knowledge interact. But he is not looking for a relation between two givens, 'power' and 'knowledge.' As always, he is trying to rethink the entire subject matter, and his 'knowledge' and 'power' are to be something else.

The cheerleaders for neoliberalism work hard to normalize dominant institutions and relations of power through a vocabulary and public pedagogy that create market-driven subjects, modes of consciousness, and ways of understanding the world that promote accommodation, quietism and passivity.

Relations of power "are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power."

Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah.

My interest is in power. How power works.

Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it.

Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.

...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.

we certainly do not want to abolish power, that would be abolishing life itself, but we need a new orientation toward it.

...gender relationships, which are tough for people to deal with, are key to whether a society orients to domination or partnership in all its relations.

Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.