Let them hate, so long as they fear.
— Accius
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.
A friend in power is a friend lost.
Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.
The man whose authority is recent is always stern.
The price of power is responsibility for the public good.
Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires, but according to our powers.
Power tires only those who do not have it.
Seek not the things that are too hard for thee, neither search the things that are beyond thy strength.
Give me a lever long enough, and a prop strong enough, I can single-handed move the world.
A word after a word after a word is power.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.
It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
Where does virgin wool come from? The sheep that runs the fastest.
The earth seemed to move with me. I found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never knew existed.
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.
What doth it profit a man if he gains the who world and loses his own soul?
— Bible
The Lord giveth and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord. [Job 1:21]
— Bible
A wise man has great power, and a man of knowledge increases strength. [Proverbs 24:5]
— Bible
Woman's influence is powerful, especially when she wants something.
I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.
Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.
Ten persons who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.
If school results were the key to power, girls would be running the world.
To create power is like a magnet, this is true because this creative power operates like a magnet. Give it a strong clear picture of what you want and this creative power starts to work magnetizing conditions about you -- attracting to you things, resources, opportunities, circumstances and even the people you need, to help bring to pass in your outer life what you have pictured.
Power is the by-product of understanding.
We should keep silent about those in power; to speak well of them almost implies flattery; to speak ill of them while they are alive is dangerous, and when they are dead is cowardly.
Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of strength.
I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.
Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to anything but power for their relief.
Power intoxicates men. When a man is intoxicated by alcohol, he can recover, but when intoxicated by power, he seldom recovers.
From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.
You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.
Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.
To achieve the mood of a warrior is not a simple matter. It is a revolution. To regard the lion and the water rats and our fellow men as equals is a magnificent act of a warrior's spirit. It takes power to do that.
Iron hand in a velvet glove.
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 pleasures imaginary.
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.
No man is wise enough, or good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.
The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.
The greatest power is often simple patience.
All the power that we exercise over others depends on the power we exercise over ourselves.
— Cotvos
Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.
The most exquisite paradox as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.
Power has only one duty --to secure the social welfare of the People.
Mighty things from small beginnings grow.
All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.
The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.
If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.
The creation of a thousand forest in one acorn.
Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.
The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.
A good indignation brings out all one's powers.
Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.
Wherever there is power there is age.
What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
There is no knowledge that is not power.
Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.
Our power is not so much in us as through us.
Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
The power to do good is also the power to do harm.
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind -- not the fiend or the sadist.
I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.
Our power is in our ability to decide.
He that has one eye is a prince among those that have none.
Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.
Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.
Napoleon for the sake of a good name broke in pieces half the world.
Every man has enough power left to carry out that of which he is convinced.
If you tell the truth, you have infinite power supporting you; but if not, you have infinite power against you.
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
Whenever there is authority, there is a natural inclination to disobedience.
Power over a man's subsistence amounts to power over his will.
The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.
The point of power is always in the present moment.
If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.
By time and council do the best we can: The event is never in the power of man.
— Herrich
Thoughts mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a burning desire are powerful things.
Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is in their power to do so, the weak destroy weakness wherever they see it.
Calmness is the cradle of power.
You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man, and to the man with special talents, this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time that the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.
The law always limits every power it gives.
I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.
I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
The exercise of power in this century has meant for all of us in the United States not arrogance, but agony.
Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil-the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.
Authority is not power; that's coercion. Authority is not knowledge; that's persuasion, or seduction. Authority is simply that the author has the right to make a statement and to be heard.
I said to the almond tree, Friend, speak to me of God, and the almond tree blossomed.
The secret to all power is to only do that which all would willingly do.
— Kinkel
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
You possess a potent force that you either use, or misuse, hundreds of times every day.
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.
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
Must a government be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?
Power? It's like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.
Power never takes a step back except in the face of more power.
Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.
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.
Power gravitates to the man who knows how.
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.
Man is born to seek power, yet his actual condition makes him a slave to the power of others.
The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.
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.
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.
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.
The property of power is to protect.
The look of a king is itself a deed.
In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
Power is every stealing from the many to the few.
Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.
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.
Voice of one, voice of none.
The king goes as far as he may, not as far as he could.
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.
To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.
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..
Personal power is the ability to take action.
We defend and we build a way of life, not for America alone, but for all mankind.
Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.
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.
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.
The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
The world is ruled only by consideration of advantages.
Power is the most persuasive rhetoric.
To gain a crown by fighting is great, to reject it divine.
No emperor has the power to dictate to the heart.
Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or you may let it run free and do its work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there; it is there. And it will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it will act.
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.
You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whatever it touches.
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.
No man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.
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.
Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it.
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.
Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.
Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.
A cock has great influence on his own dunghill.
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; these three alone lead one to sovereign power.
It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
I shan't be pulling the levers there but I shall be a very good back-seat driver.
Power is like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
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.
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.
We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.
Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.
Power's footstool is opinion and his throne the human heart.
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
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
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.
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
To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
Power in America today is control of the means of communication.
What you seek, exists within you. Every resource you need is available to you.
There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized peace.
with an eye made by quite by power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.