“It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity”

—  Gilles Deleuze

Source: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness…" by Gilles Deleuze?
Gilles Deleuze photo
Gilles Deleuze35
French philosopher 1925–1995

Related quotes

Samuel Rogers photo

“Hence, to the realms of Night, dire Demon, hence!
Thy chain of adamant can bind
That little world, the human mind,
And sink its noblest powers to impotence.”

Samuel Rogers (1763–1855) British poet

I.1 l. 1-4.
Ode to Superstition (1786)

“To say that the cosmos was expanding is equally to say that its members were contracting. The ultimate centers of power, each at first coincident with the punctual cosmos, themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 162)

Peter Sloterdijk photo

“Because knowledge is power, every hegemonic power challenged by “another knowledge” must try to stay in the center of knowledge. However, not every power is the right center for every knowledge. Reflective knowledge cannot be separated from its subject.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 77

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël photo

“Frivolity, under whatever form it appears, deprives attention of its power, thought of its originality, and sentiment of its depth.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël book Corinne

Bk. 1, ch. 3
Corinne (1807)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel photo

“The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book The Phenomenology of Spirit

Preface (J. B. Baillie translation), § 10
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

“at the center of every fairy tale lay a truth that gave the story its power.”

Susan Wiggs (1958) American writer

Source: The You I Never Knew

James Madison photo

“The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Federalist No. 48 (1 February 1788) http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers/No._48 <br class="br">1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Napoleon I of France photo

“Europe has its history, often tragic, though at intervals consoling. But to speak of any universally recognized national rights or that these rights have played any part in its history, is to play with the powers of public credulity. Always the first duty of a state has been its safety; the pledge of its safety, its power; and the limits of its power, that intelligence of which each has been made the depository. When the great powers have proclaimed any other principle, it has been only for their own purposes, and the smaller powers have never received any benefit from it.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

Jon Sobrino photo

“God is not simply power, as most people were inclined to think. God is love, and he manifests himself in the dialectics of an impotent love. … The emperor is not God. Jesus desacralizes that kind of power and its claim to be the absolute mediation of God. The pax romana is not the kingdom of God. The political organization of Rome might dazzle the world with its power, but it was oppressive; hence there was nothing sacred or divine about it. … In Jesus' eyes God's ultimate historical word is love, whereas the ultimate historical word of power in the human world is oppression. Jesus' journey to the cross is a trial dealing with the authentic nature of power.”

Jon Sobrino (1938) Spanish theologian

Christology at the Crossroads (1978), p. 369

Black Elk photo

“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka , and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.”

Black Elk (1863–1950) Oglala Lakota leader

The Sacred Pipe (1953)
Context: The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is known that true peace, which, as I have often said, is within the souls of men. <!-- p. 115

Related topics