26 Quotes About Hegemony

Having an institutional blessing to be called a ‘writer’, ‘journalist’ or an ‘academic’ does not really make one so. In fact, anyone with institutional support and titles is a suspect more than anything else.

If anything, sources that have the support and protection of power and institutions should be treated as suspicious not superior. There are very few words that make me as nauseous as words like ‘prestige’ and ‘prestigious’. Prestige is often a shortcut for getting power’s approval and blessings, which automatically, in my view, should disqualify any intellectual from being taken seriously.

— Our world has money. Lots of it. Although more than half of us live on less than $2.00 a day, the money is there. Follow the crumbs on the trail. The money funds war, elections and poverty. Keep people living on and literally like the minimum wage and below it — keep people living less than alive. — love over power. power of love. Fudge the love of power construct — it’s not working. We gotta push hegemony, oppressive leadership and division over the cliff already! —

One way or another, we spend our whole lives being conditioned into accepting some line or order, some position of domination or subjection. It’s hard to unlearn such hierarchy, to undo such control. It’s implicit.

You don't remember what it was like before Information... Competing data sources tore down any idea of truth; people voted based on falsehoods. We didn't invent surveillance: there were plenty of feeds and search trackers, but they were fragmented and firewalled by governments and private companies. The surveillance was used to propagate falsehoods.

The role of the academy as a colonial and imperial space par excellence, which in the age globalization and corporatization of practically everything, has become the biggest enemy of knowledge and the decolonial option. In fact, the academy has become a space that instead of creating options, is doing everything in its power to deny most people options and keep itself as the only game in town.

While the imperial university continues to pay lip service to letting the subaltern speak, make no mistake: the subalterns have never been silent. They have always been thinking, writing, doing, and sensing. The problem has always been with the shortsightedness and racism of the colonizers and the imperial spaces where certain knowledge gets produced and promoted, while other knowledge gets silenced, mutilated, and buried under the rubble of indifference and arrogance.

Monotonous talk of the end of American hegemony, the universal cliché of the period, is mostly a way of avoiding mounting a serious opposition to it.

Through their donations and work for voluntary organizations, the charitable rich exert enormous influence in society. As philanthropists, they acquire status within and outside of their class. Although private wealth is the basis of the hegemony of this group, philanthropy is essential to the maintenance and perpetuation of the upper class in the United States. In this sense, nonprofit activities are the nexus of a modern power elite.