Quotes
Quotes about Power
Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.
Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
...brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value.
...there is no alienation that a little power will not cure.
To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.
We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.
It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.
The untalented are more at ease in a society that gives them valid alibis for not achieving than in one where opportunities are abundant. In an affluent society, the alienated who clamor for power are largely untalented people who cannot make use of the unprecedented opportunities for self-realization, and cannot escape the confrontation with an ineffectual self.
When watching men of power in action it must be always kept in mind that, whether they know it or not, their main purpose is the elimination or neutralization of the independent individual- the independent voter, consumer, worker, owner, thinker- and that every device they employ aims at turning men into a manipulable "animated instrument" which is Aristotle's definition of a slave.
The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.
When the weak want to give an impression of strength they hint menacingly at their capacity for evil. It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.
The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
Report uttered by the people is everywhere of great power.
The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.
All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.
The appointing power of the Pope is treated as a public trust, and not as a personal perquisite.
All power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that from the people and for the people all springs, and all must exist.
The English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
From powerful causes spring the empiric's gains, Man's love of life, his weakness, and his pains; These first induce him the vile trash to try, Then lend his name, that other men may buy.
When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
