"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.
The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.
We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
George Orwell, 1984
"What happens to a society fed a diet of rushed, re-purposed, thinly reported content? Or branded content that is really merchandising — propaganda — posing as journalism? And what happens when PR turns a profit and the truth goes penniless?"
Bill Moyers, Journalism in the Pressure Cooker of Plutocracy, May 26, 2015
"Early on in the gospel traditions the power elite in Jesus’ society, who were colluding with the Roman Empire, recognized him as a threat and began to conspire to kill him. Jesus became a reference point for much of the hostility and resistance to the power of the empire because he refused to accommodate it, and told another story of reality that the empire could not co-opt."
Jonathan Merritt,Walter Brueggemann On How to Speak Truth to Power, June 26, 2014
