Change the World Without Taking Power Quotes

“Doing is inherently plural, collective, choral, communal.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“Nonsubordination is the simple, unspectacular struggle to shape one's life. It is people's reluctance to give up the simple pleasures of life, their reluctance to become machines, the determination to forge and maintain some degree of power-to.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“We are the sole creators of the system which entraps us.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“Identification is domination.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“Definition implies subordination.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“We are the only creators, the only gods. Guilty gods, negated gods, damaged, schizophrenic gods, but above all self- changing gods.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“A whole world of horror is contained in the process of definition.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“We need no promise of a happy ending to justify our rejection of a world we feel to be wrong.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“We do not need to have a picture of what a true world would be like in order to feel that there is something radically wrong with the world that exists.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“Our struggle is not to establish a new identity or composition, but to intensify anti-
identity.”
― Holloway John, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“The idea of changing society through the conquest of power thus ends up achieving the opposite of
what it sets out to achieve. Instead of the conquest of power being a step towards the abolition of
power relations, the attempt to conquer power involves the extension of the field of power relations
into the struggle against power. What starts as a scream of protest against power, against the
dehumanisation of people, against the treatment of humans as means rather than ends, becomes
converted into its opposite, into the assumption of the logic, habits and discourse of power into the
very heart of the struggle against power. For what is at issue in the revolutionary transformation of
the world is not whose power but the very existence of power. What is at issue is not who exercises
power, but how to create a world based on the mutual recognition of human dignity, on the
formation of social relations which are not power relations.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“They do not see that if we revolt against capitalism, it is not because we want a different
system of power, it is because we want a society in which power relations are dissolved. You cannot build a society of non-power relations by conquering power. Once the logic of power is
adopted, the struggle against power is already lost.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“The power-to that exists in the form of power-over, in the form, therefore, of being denied, exists not only as revolt against its denial, it exists also as material substratum of the denial. The denial cannot exist without that which is denied. The done depends on the doing.29 The owner of the done depends on the doer. No matter how much the done denies the existence of the doing, as in the case of value, as in the case of capital, there is no way in which the done can exist without the doing. No matter how much the done dominates the doing, it depends absolutely on that doing for its existence.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“Representation involves definition, exclusion, separation.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“Social self-determination does not and cannot exist in a capitalist society: capital, in all its forms, is the negation of self-determination.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“The theory of crisis is not just a theory of fear but also a theory of hope.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“Definition merely adds the locks to a world that is assumed to be closed.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“Identity negates possibility, denies openness to other life. Identity kills, both metaphorically and very, very literally.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“The rule of identity is the rule of amnesia.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“In order to protect our jobs, our visas, our profits, our chances of receiving good grades, our sanity, we pretend not to see, we sanitise our own perception, filtering out the pain, pretending that it is not here but out there, far away, in Africa, in Russia, a hundred years ago, in an otherness that, by being alien, cleanses our own experience of all negativity.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today

“It is the very horror of the world that obliges us to learn to hope.”
― John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today