Quotes about power

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

— Henry Kissinger

You possess a potent force that you either use, or misuse, hundreds of times every day.

— J. Martin Kohe

Nothing in the world is more flexible and yielding than water. Yet when it attacks the firm and the strong, none can withstand it, because they have no way to change it. So the flexible overcome the adamant, the yielding overcome the forceful. Everyone knows this, but no one can do it.

— Lao-Tzu

He who gains a victory over other men is strong; but he who gains a victory over himself is all powerful.

— Lao-Tzu

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power.

— Lao-Tzu

We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

— Max Lerner

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

— Abraham Lincoln

Must a government be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?

— Abraham Lincoln

Power? It's like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.

— Harold Macmillan

Power never takes a step back except in the face of more power.

— Malcolm X

Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.

— Horace Mann

There are powers inside of you which, if you could discover and use, would make of you everything you ever dreamed or imagined you could become.

— Orison Swett Marden

Power gravitates to the man who knows how.

— Orison Swett Marden

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.

— H. L. Mencken

Man is born to seek power, yet his actual condition makes him a slave to the power of others.

— Hans J. Morgenthau

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Not necessity, not desire --no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything --health, food, a place to live, entertainment --they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

— George Orwell

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.

— George Orwell

The property of power is to protect.

— Blaise Pascal

The look of a king is itself a deed.

— Jean Paul

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

— Laurence J. Peter

Power is every stealing from the many to the few.

— Wendell Phillips

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

— William Pitt

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

— Pittacus

Unless a serpent devour a serpent it will not become a dragon. Unless one power absorb another, it will not become great.

— Proverb

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

— Proverb

If power is for sale, sell your mother to buy it. You can always buy her back again.

— Arabian Proverb

Voice of one, voice of none.

— Italian Proverb

The king goes as far as he may, not as far as he could.

— Spanish Proverb

All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest. Howsoever, he that for want of will or wit useth not those means, must rest in servitude and poverty.

— Sir Walter Raleigh

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.

— Ayn Rand

He has the power who the majority believe in.

— Raupach

I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me..

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Personal power is the ability to take action.

— Anthony Robbins

We defend and we build a way of life, not for America alone, but for all mankind.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.

— Theodore Roosevelt

There is an urgent need -- in fact a national survival need -- for invigorating intellectual life, for upgrading the general regard for intellectual excellence. The United States must experience an intellectual renaissance or it will experience defeat. The time cannot be far off -- if indeed it is not already here -- when the strength of a nation, measured in terms of any kind of world competition, will depend less on the number of its bombs than on the number of its learned men.

— Elmo Roper

A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it.

— Jean Rostand

The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.

— Jean Rostand

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

— Bertrand Russell

The world is ruled only by consideration of advantages.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

Power is the most persuasive rhetoric.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

To gain a crown by fighting is great, to reject it divine.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

No emperor has the power to dictate to the heart.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.

— Seneca

If you sit in judgment, investigate, if you sit in supreme power, sit in command.

— Seneca

He is the most powerful who has himself, in his power.

— Seneca

Authority founded on injustice is never of long duration.

— Seneca

Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

— William Shakespeare

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

— George Bernard Shaw

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

— George Bernard Shaw

Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whatever it touches.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great, great powers, and I would say we only have learnt a very, very small part of what it can do.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

No man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.

— Sydney Smith

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power -- he's free again.

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it.

— Lincoln Steffens

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

— Gloria Steinem

Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.

— Gloria Steinem

Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.

— Adlai E. Stevenson

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.

— Jonathan Swift

A cock has great influence on his own dunghill.

— Publilius Syrus

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; these three alone lead one to sovereign power.

— Lord Alfred Tennyson

It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.

— Margaret Thatcher

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.

— Margaret Thatcher

I shan't be pulling the levers there but I shall be a very good back-seat driver.

— Margaret Thatcher

Power is like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren't.

— Margaret Thatcher

We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea.

— Paul Tillich

Louis the XVI knew how to love, pardon, and die: had he known how to punish, he would have known how to reign.

— Tilly

We will by conscious command evolve cerebral centers which will permit us to use powers that we now are not even capable of imagining.

— Dr. Frederick Tilney

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.

— Stewart Udall

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.

— Raoul Vaneigem

Power's footstool is opinion and his throne the human heart.

— Sir Aubrey De Vere

It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of

— Gore Vidal

Powerful men in particular suffer from the delusion that human beings have no memories. I would go so far as to say that the distinguishing trait of powerful men is the psychotic certainty that people forget acts of infamy as easily as their parents birth

— Stephen Vizinczey

Alexander at the head of the world never tasted the true pleasure that boys of his own age have enjoyed at the head of a school.

— Horace Walpole

The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either

— Simone Weil

To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.

— Simone Weil

Power in America today is control of the means of communication.

— Theodore White

What you seek, exists within you. Every resource you need is available to you.

— Marcia Wieder

There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized peace.

— Woodrow T. Wilson

With the eye made quiet by power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

— William Wordsworth

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

— Mao Zedong

When a man's willing and eager the god's join in.

— Aeschylus

When one is willing and eager, the Gods join in.

— Aeschylus

A man can do all things if he but wills them.

— Leon Battista Alberti

Will localizes us; thought universalizes us.

— Henri Frederic Amiel

Happiness is secured through virtue; it is a good attained by man's own will.

— St. Thomas Aquinas

When thou standest still from thinking and willing of self, the eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking will be revealed to thee, and so God heareth and seeth through thee. Thine own hearing, willing, and seeing hindereth thee, that thou dost not see nor hear God.

— Jacob Boehme

Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.

— Dale Carnegie

Self-will so ardent and active that it will break a world to pieces to make a stool to sit on.

— Richard Cecil

A person who is wise does nothing against their will, nothing with sighing or under coercion.

— Marcus T. Cicero

Free will and determinism are like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is determinism. The way you play your hand is free will.

— Norman Cousins

Will cannot be quenched against its will.

— Dante Alighieri

Nothing can withstand the power of the human will if it is willing to stake its very existence to the extent of its purpose.

— Benjamin Disraeli

What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that's another matter.

— Peter F. Drucker

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

— James A. Froude

Nothing is easy to the unwilling.

— Thomas Fuller

Don't let your will roar when your power only whispers.

— Thomas Fuller