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

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

Baltasar Gracian

The man whose authority is recent is always stern.

Aeschylus

All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.

Dworkin, Andrea

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

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

Lincoln, Abraham

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

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Einstein, Albert

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.

John Lehman

10.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

11.

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

Rostand, Jean

12.

The will is commendable though the ability may be wanting.

Ovid

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Byrnes, James F.

19.

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Peter, Laurence J.

20.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Atwood, Margaret

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

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

23.

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

24.

To achieve, you need thought.You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.

Rand, Ayn

25.

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

Lord Macaulay

26.

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

Seneca

27.

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

Seneca

28.

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

Aquinas, St. Thomas

29.

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

30.

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

White, Theodore

31.

When a man's willing and eager the god's join in.

Aeschylus

32.

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

Elie Wiesel

33.

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

Steinem, Gloria

34.

The price of power is responsibility for the public good.

Aldrich, Withrop

35.

People do not lack strength; they lack will.

Hugo, Victor

36.

Will is character in action.

Mcdougall, William

37.

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

38.

Thoughts mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a burning desire are powerful things.

Hill, Napoleon

39.

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

Alinsky, Saul

40.

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

Thatcher, Margaret

41.

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

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Swift, Jonathan

44.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

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

46.

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

47.

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

Proverb

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

Malcolm X

50.

The point of power is always in the present moment.

Hay, Louise L.