Quotes about power

Let them hate, so long as they fear.

— Accius

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

— Lord Acton

Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.

— Abigail Adams

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.

— John Adams

The man whose authority is recent is always stern.

— Aeschylus

The price of power is responsibility for the public good.

— Withrop Aldrich

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

— Saul Alinsky

Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires, but according to our powers.

— Henri Frederic Amiel

Power tires only those who do not have it.

— Giulio Andreotti

Seek not the things that are too hard for thee, neither search the things that are beyond thy strength.

— Apocrypha

Give me a lever long enough, and a prop strong enough, I can single-handed move the world.

— Archimedes

A word after a word after a word is power.

— Margaret Atwood

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

— Marcus Aurelius

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

— Marcus Aurelius

Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.

— Francis Bacon

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.

— Francis Bacon

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

— James Baldwin

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

— Honore De Balzac

Where does virgin wool come from? The sheep that runs the fastest.

— Harry F. Banks

The earth seemed to move with me. I found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never knew existed.

— Roger Bannister

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

— Roland Barthes

Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.

— Jean Baudrillard

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

— Stephen Vincent Benet

The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.

— Aneurin Bevan

What doth it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?

— Bible

The Lord giveth and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord. [Job 1:21]

— Bible

A wise man has great power, and a man of knowledge increases strength. [Proverbs 24:5]

— Bible

Woman's influence is powerful, especially when she wants something.

— Josh Billings

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

Ten persons who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

If school results were the key to power, girls would be running the world.

— Sarah Boseley

To create power is like a magnet, this is true because this creative power operates like a magnet. Give it a strong clear picture of what you want and this creative power starts to work magnetizing conditions about you -- attracting to you things, resources, opportunities, circumstances and even the people you need, to help bring to pass in your outer life what you have pictured.

— Claude M. Bristol

Power is the by-product of understanding.

— Jacob Bronowski

We should keep silent about those in power; to speak well of them almost implies flattery; to speak ill of them while they are alive is dangerous, and when they are dead is cowardly.

— Jean De La Bruyere

Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of strength.

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.

— Edmund Burke

Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to anything but power for their relief.

— Edmund Burke

Power intoxicates men. When a man is intoxicated by alcohol, he can recover, but when intoxicated by power, he seldom recovers.

— James F. Byrnes

From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.

— Albert Camus

You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

— Al Capone

Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.

— Andrew Carnegie

To achieve the mood of a warrior is not a simple matter. It is a revolution. To regard the lion and the water rats and our fellow men as equals is a magnificent act of a warrior's spirit. It takes power to do that.

— Carlos Castaneda

Iron hand in a velvet glove.

— Charles V

To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it. The pains of power are real; its pleasures imaginary.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.

— Charles Caleb Colton

No man is wise enough, or good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.

— Charles Caleb Colton

The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.

— Charles Horton Cooley

The greatest power is often simple patience.

— E. Joseph Cossman

All the power that we exercise over others depends on the power we exercise over ourselves.

— Cotvos

Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.

— Stephen R. Covey

The most exquisite paradox as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.

— Ram Dass

Power has only one duty --to secure the social welfare of the People.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Mighty things from small beginnings grow.

— John Dryden

All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.

— Andrea Dworkin

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

— Albert Einstein

If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.

— T. S. Eliot

The creation of a thousand forest in one acorn.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wherever there is power there is age.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no knowledge that is not power.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.

— Epictetus

Our power is not so much in us as through us.

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

— Michel Foucault

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

— Milton Friedman

The power to do good is also the power to do harm.

— Milton Friedman

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind -- not the fiend or the sadist.

— Erich Fromm

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

— Robert Frost

Our power is in our ability to decide.

— Buckminster Fuller

He that has one eye is a prince among those that have none.

— Thomas Fuller

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

— William Gaddis

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.

— Mahatma Gandhi

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.

— Jean Genet

Napoleon for the sake of a good name broke in pieces half the world.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Every man has enough power left to carry out that of which he is convinced.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If you tell the truth, you have infinite power supporting you; but if not, you have infinite power against you.

— Charles Gordon

Whenever there is authority, there is a natural inclination to disobedience.

— Thomas C. Haliburton

Power over a man's subsistence amounts to power over his will.

— Alexander Hamilton

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

— Vaclav Havel

The point of power is always in the present moment.

— Louise L. Hay

If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.

— William Hazlitt

By time and council do the best we can: The event is never in the power of man.

— Herrich

Thoughts mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a burning desire are powerful things.

— Napoleon Hill

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

— Eric Hoffer

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is in their power to do so, the weak destroy weakness wherever they see it.

— Eric Hoffer

Calmness is the cradle of power.

— Josiah Gilbert Holland

You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man, and to the man with special talents, this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time that the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The law always limits every power it gives.

— David Hume

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

— Thomas Jefferson

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

— Thomas Jefferson

The exercise of power in this century has meant for all of us in the United States not arrogance, but agony.

— Lyndon B. Johnson

Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil-the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.

— William George Jordan

Authority is not power; that's coercion. Authority is not knowledge; that's persuasion, or seduction. Authority is simply that the author has the right to make a statement and to be heard.

— Herman Kahn

I said to the almond tree, Friend, speak to me of God, and the almond tree blossomed.

— Nikos Kazantzakis

The secret to all power is to only do that which all would willingly do.

— Kinkel