Motivational Quotes

Power

Whenever there is authority, there is a natural inclination to disobedience.

- Haliburton, Thomas C.

Best Quotes about Power

Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of strength.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

Capone, Al

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

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.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

Personal power is the ability to take action.

Robbins, Anthony

People do not lack strength; they lack will.

Hugo, Victor

He that has one eye is a prince among those that have none.

Fuller, Thomas

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

David Brin

The power to do good is also the power to do harm.

Friedman, Milton

10.

The price of power is responsibility for the public good.

Aldrich, Withrop

11.

He who gains a victory over other men is strong; but he who gains a victory over himself is all powerful.

Lao-Tzu

12.

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

13.

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

Friedman, Milton

14.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Hare, David

15.

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

Steinem, Gloria

16.

The man whose authority is recent is always stern.

Aeschylus

17.

To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.

Weil, Simone

18.

Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

19.

The will is deaf and hears no heedful friends.

Shakespeare, William

20.

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.

Genet, Jean

21.

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

Thatcher, Margaret

22.

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.

Foucault, Michel

23.

The law always limits every power it gives.

Hume, David

24.

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..

Rilke, Rainer Maria

25.

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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.

Havel, Vaclav

27.

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.

Hoffer, Eric

28.

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

Gaddis, William

29.

Power gravitates to the man who knows how.

Marden, Orison Swett

30.

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.

John Lehman

31.

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

Fosdick, Harry Emerson

32.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Lord Acton

33.

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

Kinkel

34.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Atwood, Margaret

35.

In great things it is enough even to have willed.

Propertius, Sextus

36.

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

Lord Macaulay

37.

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

38.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

Barthes, Roland

39.

If you sit in judgment, investigate, if you sit in supreme power, sit in command.

Seneca

40.

Let not thy will roar, when thy power can but whisper.

Dr. Thomas Fuller

41.

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

42.

A wise man has great power, and a man of knowledge increases strength. [Proverbs 24:5]

Bible

43.

Power is every stealing from the many to the few.

Phillips, Wendell

44.

He has the power who the majority believe in.

Raupach

45.

Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.