Powerful people get away with things. That's one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.

Power is the ability not to have to please.

The idea of power as a possession, whose asset can be banked and drawn on when needed, comes easy to a society whose rules grow out of the methods of finance capitalism.

Mythology is like gravity, inconvenient at times, but necessary for cohesion.

If there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, there is nothing more ubiquitously pervasive than an idea whose time won't go.

If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.

Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.