Writing might be unalloyed joy, were it not for the fact that power is always shadowed by responsibility. Thankfully, the absolute power that writers have is not weighted down with absolute responsibility. It can neither be suppressed nor diminished, except by choice.
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.
All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.
Forgiveness is enshrined in the Lord's prayer - forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. These scriptures point to the power of forgiveness not only as a way to absolve transgressions but to ensure that the person extending forgiveness will be forgiven of theirs.
The animal world seizes its food in masses little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable, through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its nourishment molecule by molecule.
If the large power voluntarily abstains from using its full power or feels the strategic situation to be such that it cannot do so, it in effect loses the advantage of being a big power.
A king without power is an absurdity.
The steep decline in America's image and standing after 9/11 is a direct reflection of global distaste for the instruments of American hard power: the Iraq invasion, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, Blackwater's killings of Iraqi civilians.
The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.
But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.
Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
I believe that every leader has a right to implement his own policy. But when I see things that are done that are not right - abuse of power, wrong approaches, wrong strategies, making use of foreign consultants, including those discarded by other countries - I feel that I have to have my say.
The government is so out of control. It is so bloated and infested with fraud and deceit and corruption and abuse of power.
What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.
I have very close friends who are very devout Catholics, and I talked to them before the 'Da Vinci Code,' and it was very difficult for them, but I talked to them before 'Angels and Demons,' and they said the scandal, abuse of power and violence was part of church history, which you can read about in the Vatican bookstore.
By ensuring that no one in government has too much power, the Constitution helps protect ordinary Americans every day against abuse of power by those in authority.
I think of my films as not necessarily political but more moral. Between my father, my stepfather, and my mother - they all felt pretty passionately about the importance of standing up and doing the right thing, and none of them were suck-ups. What motivates me is usually abuse of power.
