Motivational Quotes

Power

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

- Harry Shearer

Best Quotes about Power

Power tires only those who do not have it.

Andreotti, Giulio

Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

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

Bacon, Francis

Unless a serpent devour a serpent it will not become a dragon. Unless one power absorb another, it will not become great.

Proverb

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

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

Einstein, Albert

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.

Jordan, William George

Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whatever it touches.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

10.

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

11.

Personal power is the ability to take action.

Robbins, Anthony

12.

Power is the most persuasive rhetoric.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

13.

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

Russell, Bertrand

14.

The sole advantage of power is that you can do more good.

Baltasar Gracian

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.

The will of man is his happiness.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

17.

Let them hate, so long as they fear.

Accius

18.

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

Morgenthau, Hans J.

19.

Power intoxicates men. When a man is intoxicated by alcohol, he can recover, but when intoxicated by power, he seldom recovers.

Byrnes, James F.

20.

People do not lack strength; they lack will.

Hugo, Victor

21.

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

Kinkel

22.

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

Gaddis, William

23.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

24.

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.

Swift, Jonathan

25.

Will cannot be quenched against its will.

Dante Alighieri

26.

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.

Rostand, Jean

27.

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

28.

Man was predestined to have free will.

Luyah, Hal

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized peace.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Atwood, Margaret

35.

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

All things must; man is the only creature that wills.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

37.

The world is ruled only by consideration of advantages.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

38.

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

Proverb, Norse

39.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

40.

He is the most powerful who has himself, in his power.

Seneca

41.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

42.

We will by conscious command evolve cerebral centers which will permit us to use powers that we now are not even capable of imagining.

Tilney, Dr. Frederick

43.

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

Barthes, Roland

44.

Voice of one, voice of none.

Proverb, Italian

45.

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

46.

I shan't be pulling the levers there but I shall be a very good back-seat driver.

Thatcher, Margaret

47.

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

Elie Wiesel

48.

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

49.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

No action will be considered blameless, unless the will was so, for by the will the act was dictated.

Seneca