Quotes about Power

There is a silence. But sometimes it's as dangerous not to speak.

The Aunts had their methods, and their informants: no walls were solid for them, no doors locked.

He has something we don't have, he has the word.

We're ankle deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.

Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.

Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.

His head is a little below mine, so that when he looks up at me it's at a juvenile angle. It must amuse him, this fake subservience. (...) The problem wasn't only the women, he says. The main problem was with the men. There was nothing for them any more. (...) That was part of it, the sex was too easy. Anyone could just buy it. There was nothing to work for, nothing to fight for. (...)

Yes," she said in a voice squeaky with fright. She was younger and still attractive then; she hadn't yet allowed her body to engorge. I have noted since that some kinds of men like to bully beautiful women.

I saw you as another god.

It would make me feel that I have power. But such a feeling would be an illusion, and too risky.

While I read, the Commander sits and watches me doing it, without speaking but also without taking his eyes off me. This watching is a curiously sexual act, and I feel undressed while he does it.

Its racist policies, for instance, were firmly rooted in the pre-Gilead period, and racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did.