Motivational Quotes

Power

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

Best Quotes about Power

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

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

Hendrix, Jimi

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

Alinsky, Saul

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

Eliot, T. S.

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power.

Lao-Tzu

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

Seek not the things that are too hard for thee, neither search the things that are beyond thy strength.

Apocrypha

Where does virgin wool come from? The sheep that runs the fastest.

Banks, Harry F.

The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.

Cooley, Charles Horton

10.

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

Steinem, Gloria

11.

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

Carnegie, Andrew

12.

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

Malcolm X

13.

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.

Patton, George S.

14.

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

Seneca

15.

The world is ruled only by consideration of advantages.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

16.

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

Gaddis, William

17.

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

18.

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

Smith, Sydney

19.

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

Proverb, Spanish

20.

Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

Shakespeare, William

21.

When the will is ready the feet are light.

Proverb

22.

The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either

Weil, Simone

23.

In great things it is enough even to have willed.

Propertius, Sextus

24.

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

Lord Macaulay

25.

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.

John Lehman

26.

Power is the by-product of understanding.

Bronowski, Jacob

27.

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

28.

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

Stephen Vincent Benet

29.

He has the power who the majority believe in.

Raupach

30.

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

Niebuhr, Reinhold

31.

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

Friedman, Milton

32.

Authority founded on injustice is never of long duration.

Seneca

33.

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

Baltasar Gracian

34.

Voice of one, voice of none.

Proverb, Italian

35.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.

Mencken, H. L.

36.

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

37.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Bacon, Francis

41.

Where there is a will there is a lawsuit.

Mizner, Addison

42.

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