“Crowley wanted to be a magician because he wanted power -- power over other people.”
Source: Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987), p. 157
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Colin Wilson 192
author 1931–2013Related quotes
Interview with Max Delbruck (1978), p. 88. Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena, California.
“Struggle of power is natural in human because with power their individuality prevails over others.”
"Humanity", Ch.IV, "Rule: Power and Order" Part I
“I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.”
Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991), Chapter 18 (p. 549)
Letter to Lucy Martin Donnelly, February 10, 1916
1910s
“I want people to see their own power.”
2000-09, Meet the Most Interesting Person in China, 2009
Dune Genesis (1980)
Context: Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem.
It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane. … Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.
It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous.
Variant: Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power — not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.
As quoted in "Comes Spake the Cuckoo" the Far Gone interview (13 September 1992) http://www.intrepidtrips.com/kesey/fahey.html by Todd Brendan Fahey http://www.fargonebooks.com/bio.html
Context: Leary can get a part of my mind that's kind of rusted shut grinding again, just by being around him and talking, 'cause that's where he works. He knows that area of the mind and the brain, and he knows the difference between the two areas. He's a real master at getting your old wheel squeaking again. … When we first broke into that forbidden box in the other dimension, we knew that we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it. It is still largely unexplored and uncharted. People like Leary have done the best they can to chart it sort of underground, but the government and the powers do not want this world charted, because it threatens established powers. It always has.
Interview in The Metro http://www.metro.co.uk/showbiz/interviews/39209-60-seconds-jodie-marsh#ixzz1o9GF3Az0, undated.