Motivational Quotes

Power

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

- Vidal, Gore

Best Quotes about Power

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

Tilly

Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.

Steinem, Gloria

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

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

Alinsky, Saul

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.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Ten persons who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Proverb, Norse

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

Seneca

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

Camus, Albert

10.

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

Harry Shearer

11.

I said to the almond tree, Friend, speak to me of God, and the almond tree blossomed.

Kazantzakis, Nikos

12.

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; these three alone lead one to sovereign power.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

13.

The king goes as far as he may, not as far as he could.

Proverb, Spanish

14.

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

Seneca

15.

In great things it is enough even to have willed.

Propertius, Sextus

16.

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

Steinem, Gloria

17.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Atwood, Margaret

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.

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

Lao-Tzu

20.

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.

Castaneda, Carlos

21.

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

Seneca

22.

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

White, Theodore

23.

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.

Stewart L. Udall

24.

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

25.

Let them hate, so long as they fear.

Accius

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Power? It's like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.

Macmillan, Harold

29.

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

Elie Wiesel

30.

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

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

33.

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

34.

If we cannot do what we will, we must will what we can.

Proverb, Yiddish

35.

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

Friedman, Milton

36.

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

Hooker, Richard

37.

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

Aquinas, St. Thomas

38.

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

39.

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

Fromm, Erich

40.

Free will and determinism are like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is determinism. The way you play your hand is free will.

Cousins, Norman

41.

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

42.

The exercise of power in this century has meant for all of us in the United States not arrogance, but agony.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

43.

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

Hamilton, Alexander

44.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

Hendrix, Jimi

45.

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

46.

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

Friedman, Milton

47.

Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.

Mann, Horace

48.

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

Stephen Vincent Benet

49.

Will is character in action.