Motivational Quotes

Power

Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.

- Bacon, Francis

Best Quotes about Power

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.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

When one is willing and eager, the Gods join in.

Aeschylus

Happiness is secured through virtue; it is a good attained by man's own will.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.

A. Bartlett Giamatti

The secret of all power is - save your force. If you want high pressure you must choke off waste.

Joseph Farrell

What a person wills and not what they know determines their worth or unworth, power or impotence, happiness or unhappiness.

Lindner, Robert

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.

Charles Caleb Colton

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

Vizinczey, Stephen

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

Stephen Vincent Benet

10.

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.

Lord Macaulay

11.

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.

Orwell, George

12.

From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.

Camus, Albert

13.

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.

Roper, Elmo

14.

What you seek, exists within you. Every resource you need is available to you.

Wieder, Marcia

15.

Louis the XVI knew how to love, pardon, and die: had he known how to punish, he would have known how to reign.

Tilly

16.

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.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

17.

Those that are firm in their will mold the world to themselves.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it.

Steffens, Lincoln

19.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?

Harry Shearer

20.

You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

Capone, Al

21.

The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.

Rostand, Jean

22.

Power gravitates to the man who knows how.

Marden, Orison Swett

23.

The secret to all power is to only do that which all would willingly do.

Kinkel

24.

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.

Orwell, George

25.

When thou standest still from thinking and willing of self, the eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking will be revealed to thee, and so God heareth and seeth through thee. Thine own hearing, willing, and seeing hindereth thee, that thou dost not see nor hear God.

Boehme, Jacob

26.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

Shaw, George Bernard

28.

Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

29.

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.

Dass, Ram

30.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

The great secret of power is never to will to do more than you can accomplish.

Henrik Ibsen

32.

The one who wills is the one who can.

Proverb

33.

Power never takes a step back except in the face of more power.

Malcolm X

34.

Voice of one, voice of none.

Proverb, Italian

35.

We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

Lerner, Max

36.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

Baldwin, James

37.

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

Gaddis, William

38.

Give me a lever long enough, and a prop strong enough, I can single-handed move the world.

Archimedes

39.

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

40.

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.

Hoffer, Eric

41.

Power is the most persuasive rhetoric.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

42.

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

43.

Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let everyone know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.

James A. Garfield

44.

If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?

Lois McMaster Bujold

45.

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.

Kahn, Herman

46.

Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.

Elie Wiesel

47.

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.

Patton, George S.

48.

Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

49.

No man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.