Motivational Quotes

Power

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.

- Frost, Robert

Best Quotes about Power

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Personal power is the ability to take action.

Robbins, Anthony

It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.

Thatcher, Margaret

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

Russell, Bertrand

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.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

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

Harry Shearer

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

Jefferson, Thomas

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

Power in America today is control of the means of communication.

White, Theodore

10.

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.

Raleigh, Sir Walter

11.

Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires, but according to our powers.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

12.

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.

Niebuhr, Reinhold

13.

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.

Bruyere, Jean De La

14.

Power is like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren't.

Thatcher, Margaret

15.

Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.

Carnegie, Andrew

16.

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.

Baudrillard, Jean

17.

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

18.

To gain a crown by fighting is great, to reject it divine.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

19.

Our power is not so much in us as through us.

Fosdick, Harry Emerson

20.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Hare, David

21.

What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that's another matter.

Drucker, Peter F.

22.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

Our bodies are our gardens... our wills are our gardeners.

Shakespeare, William

24.

Man is born to seek power, yet his actual condition makes him a slave to the power of others.

Morgenthau, Hans J.

25.

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

26.

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

Pitt, William

27.

Must a government be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?

Lincoln, Abraham

28.

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

Capone, Al

29.

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Kissinger, Henry

30.

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

Baldwin, James

31.

To live by one man's will becomes the cause of all misery.

Hooker, Richard

32.

Power over a man's subsistence amounts to power over his will.

Hamilton, Alexander

33.

A boy's will is the will of the wind.

Proverb, Norse

34.

Power is the by-product of understanding.

Bronowski, Jacob

35.

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

Archimedes

36.

When the will is ready the feet are light.

Proverb

37.

Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

Shakespeare, William

38.

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.

Tillich, Paul

39.

A person who is wise does nothing against their will, nothing with sighing or under coercion.

Cicero, Marcus T.

40.

The earth seemed to move with me. I found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never knew existed.

Bannister, Roger

41.

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

42.

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

Smith, Sydney

43.

Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.

Proverb, Chinese

44.

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.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

45.

If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.

Eliot, T. S.

46.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind -- not the fiend or the sadist.

Fromm, Erich

47.

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

Rostand, Jean

48.

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.

Covey, Stephen R.

49.

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

Alinsky, Saul

50.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

Friedman, Milton