Power famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.
-- Abigail Adams -
I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, 'Give, give.'
-- Abigail Adams -
I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end... I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
Must a government be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?
-- Abraham Lincoln -
The efficiency of a truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy.
-- Adolf Hitler -
The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures.... The separate existence of the federal states will not be done away.... The number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such law is in itself a limited one.
-- Adolf Hitler -
The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason is terror and force.
-- Adolf Hitler -
This only is denied even to God: the power to undo the past.
-- Agathon -
Christianity takes for granted the absence of any self-help and offers a power which is nothing less than the power of God.
-- Aiden Wilson Tozer -
Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.
-- Alan Moore -
But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
-- Alan Watts -
In fact, other people create for lack of power. I, on the other hand, do not need a work: I live.
-- Albert Camus -
For a man who loves power, competition from the gods is annoying. I have done away with that. I have proven to these illusory godsthat a man, if he has the will, can practice, without any apprenticeship, their ridiculous trade.
-- Albert Camus -
What is a firm hand to me, of what use to me is this astonishing power if I cannot change the order of things, if I cannot make the sun set in the east, that suffering diminish and that beings no longer die?
-- Albert Camus -
Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
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.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
There are contingency plans in the NATO doctrine to fire a nuclear weapon for demonstrative purposes, to demonstrate to the other side that they are exceeding the limits of toleration in the conventional area.
-- Alexander Haig -
In the main it will be found that a power over a man's support (salary) is a power over his will.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
Force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished.
-- Alfred Thayer Mahan -
Beauty, n: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
Eulogy. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
You see what power is holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them.
-- Amy Tan -
Man's responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases.
-- Andre Gide -
Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.
-- Andrea Dworkin -
Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.
-- Andrew Carnegie -
Moral power is probably best when it is not used. The less you use it the more you have.
-- Andrew Young -
The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.
-- Aneurin Bevan -
The real problem is that the way that power is given out in our society pits us against each other.
-- Anita Hill -
My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power.
-- Anna Deavere Smith -
Prostitution requires for its diminution not only laws, well enforced, to abolish the traffic in womanhood; not only better social protection against harpies who seduce young girls seeking an honest livelihood; not only better chaperonage of young girls in exposed occupations; not only better opportunities for natural enjoyment of youthful pleasure under morally safe conditions; not only these - but most of all, greater power on the part of the average young girl to earn her own support under right conditions and for a living wage.
-- Anna Garlin Spencer -
But games always cover something deep and intense, else there would be no excitement in them, no pleasure, no power to stir us.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
the possession of power brings on madness.
-- Ariana Franklin -
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.
-- Aristotle -
Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.
-- Aristotle -
The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole.
-- Arnold J. Toynbee -
Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.
-- Arnold J. Toynbee -
The prevailin' weakness of most public men is to Slop Over!.... G. Washington never slopt over.
-- Artemas Ward -
All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant -
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
-- Audre Lorde -
It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.
-- Aung San Suu Kyi -
The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.
-- Aung San Suu Kyi -
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
-- Ayn Rand -
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
-- Ayn Rand -
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
-- Ayn Rand -
I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
-- Ayn Rand -
No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.
-- Ayn Rand -
Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
-- Ayn Rand -
In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there- a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart -
The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart -
I'm trying to engage issues of power and sexuality and money and life and death and power. Power is the most free-flowing element in society, maybe next to money, but in fact they both motor each other.
-- Barbara Kruger -
Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.
-- Barbara Tuchman -
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
-- Barbara Tuchman -
The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.
-- Barbara Tuchman -
Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
-- Barbara Tuchman -
Capitalism works better from every perspective when the economic decision makers are forced to share power with those who will be affected by those decisions.
-- Barney Frank -
The culminating point of administration is to know well how much power, great or small, we ought to use in all circumstances.
-- Baron de Montesquieu -
Power ought to serve as a check to power.
-- Baron de Montesquieu -
If we are true, if we can love, if we have vision, if we can have courage, we can, we should, we ought to, we will...
-- Ben Okri -
Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
-- Benito Mussolini -
Demagogues and agitators are very unpleasant, they are incidental to a free and constitutional country, and you must put up with these inconveniences or do without many important advantages.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
Circumstances are beyond human control, but our conduct is in our own power.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
Power has only one duty - to secure the social welfare of the People.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
Next to the assumption of power is the responsibility of relinquishing it.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
Sir, I am no sycophant or worshipper of power anywhere.
-- Benjamin F. Wade -
That power is in vain which is never in use.
-- Benjamin Whichcote -
Right and truth are greater than any power, and all power is limited by right.
-- Benjamin Whichcote -
There is something about inside information which seems to paralyse a man's reasoning powers.
-- Bernard Baruch -
The less the power, the greater the desire to exercise it.
-- Bernard Levin -
Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
-- Bertrand Russell -
Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
-- Bertrand Russell -
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
-- Bertrand Russell -
The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique.
-- Bertrand Russell -
Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely.
-- Bertrand Russell -
We have to have armies! We have to have military power! We have to have police forces, whether it's police in a great city or police in an international scale to keep those madmen from taking over the world and robbing the world of its liberties.
-- Billy Graham -
The story of Jesus is very fascinating. It still has such a tremendous power, even after 2,000 years! We don't really know if he existed as a historical figure.
-- Bjorn Ulvaeus -
Undoubtedly equality of goods is just; but, being unable to cause might to obey justice, men has made it just to obey might. Unable to strengthen justice, they have justified might--so that the just and the strong should unite, and there should be peace, which is the sovereign good.
-- Blaise Pascal -
Fishing is one of the greatest things that you can do, it has the power to relax you like nothing else and there's nothing quite like the thrill of the catch.
-- Bob Gibson -
There are few things more dangerous than a mixture of power, arrogance and incompetence.
-- Bob Herbert -
The number of illegal activities were so large that one was bound to come out and lead to the uncovering of the others. Nixon was too willing to use the power of government to settle scores and get even with enemies.
-- Bob Woodward -
There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.
-- Booker T. Washington -
Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.
-- Brenda Ueland -
When you allow yourself to begin to dream big dreams, creatively abandon the activities that are taking up too much of your time, and focus your inward energies on alleviating your main constraints, you start to feel an incredible sense of power and confidence.
-- Brian Tracy -
Not being tense but ready. Not thinking but not dreaming. Not being set but flexible. Liberation from the uneasy sense of confinement. It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come.
-- Bruce Lee -
Politicians have limited power. They can't impose morality on themselves. How can they impose it on the country?
-- Cal Thomas -
There is value in being free and spontaneous but the greatest power comes from seeing and using what results from that freedom.
-- Carole Katchen -
If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.
-- Carter G. Woodson -
She had never imagined she had the power to make someone else so happy. And not a magical power, either--a purely human one.
-- Cassandra Clare -
Power without a nation's confidence is nothing.
-- Catherine the Great -
You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.
-- Catherine the Great -
Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.
-- Charles de Gaulle -
The more developed sexual passion, in both sexes, is very largely an emotion of power, domination, or appropriation. There is no state of feeling that says mine, mine, more fiercely.
-- Charles Horton Cooley -
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
