Quotes
Quotes about Power
Without his rod revers'd, And backward mutters of dissevering power.
Power ought to serve as a check to power.
Though the power be wanting, yet the wish is praiseworthy. [Lat., Ut desint vires tamen est laudanda voluntas.]
Every Communist must grasp the truth: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.".
We often say how impressive power is. But I do not find it impressive at all. The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure. They are necessary symbols. They protect what we cherish. But they are witness to hum.
There is no knowledge that is not power.
Nothing destroys authority so much as the unequal and untimely interchange of power, pressed too far and relaxed too much.
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.
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-controlâthese three alone lead to power.
We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.
Power does not corrupt man; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power.
I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.
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.
Power has no limits.
Man is born to seek power, yet his actual condition makes him a slave to the power of others.
To have command is to have all the power you will ever need. To have all the power you will ever need, is to have the world in the palm of you hand.
Oh, for a forty-parson power to chant Thy praise, Hypocrisy! Oh, for a hymn Loud as the virtues thou dost loudly vaunt, Not practise!
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
It is one of the greatest economic errors to put any limitation upon production.... We have not the power to produce more than there is a potential to consume.
Since the social victim has been oppressed by society, he comes to feel that his individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by his own initiative. Without realizing it, he makes society rather than himself the agent of change. The power he finds in his victimization may lead him to collective action against society, but it also encourages passivity within the sphere of his personal life.
Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness. They are more willing to follow their own vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Unexplored places do not frighten them- or not, at any rate, as much as they frighten those around them. This is one of the secrets of their power. That which we call "genius" has a great deal to do with courage and daring, a great deal to do with nerve.
The power of habit and the charm of novelty are the two adverse forces which explain the follies of mankind.
Physicists have determined that even the most solid and heavy mass of matter we see is mostly empty space. But at the submicroscopic level, specks of matter scattered through a vast emptiness have such incredible density and weight, and are linked to one another by such powerful forces, that together they produce all the properties of concrete, cast iron and solid rock. In much the same way, specks of knowledge are scattered through a vast emptiness of ignorance, and everything depends upon how solid the individual specks of knowledge are, and on how powerfully linked and coordinated they are with one another.
