Quotes
Quotes about Power
Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.
The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking power. This means to foster democratic freedom.
Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars.
Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous.
Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression.
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
...the argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.
The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future.
Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Odin, thou whirlwind, what a threat is this Thou threatenest what transcends thy might, even thine, For of all powers the mightiest far art thou, Lord over men on earth, and Gods in Heaven; Yet even from thee thyself hath been withheld One thing--to undo what thou thyself hast ruled.
He hath no power that hath not power to use.
Then, everlasting Love, restrain thy will; 'Tis god-like to have power, but not to kill.
Every dictator uses religion as a prop to keep himself in power.
Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.
The balance of power.
Dim with the mist of years, gray flits the shade of power.
Men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power.
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 pleasure imaginary.
For that can power give more than food and drink, To live at ease, and not be bound to think?
Power is neither male nor female.
Patience and Gentleness is Power. - Leigh Hunt (James Henry Leigh Hunt),
My opinion is, that power should always be distrusted, in whatever hands it is placed.
There is nothing which power cannot believe of itself, when it is praised as equal to the gods. [Lat., Nihil est quod credere de se Non possit, quum laudatur dis aequa potestas.]
Those who do not wish to kill any one, wish they had the power. [Lat., Et qui nolunt occidere quemquam Posse volunt.]
