Motivational Quotes

Power

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

- Hamilton, Alexander

Best Quotes about Power

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

Aeschylus

Our power is in our ability to decide.

Fuller, Buckminster

If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?

Lois McMaster Bujold

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

Lincoln, Abraham

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

Seneca

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

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

Authority founded on injustice is never of long duration.

Seneca

I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.

Gandhi, Mahatma

10.

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

Swift, Jonathan

11.

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

Gaddis, William

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

Pitt, William

15.

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

16.

You see what power is - holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them!

Amy Tan

17.

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

Lord Macaulay

18.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Atwood, Margaret

19.

Personal power is the ability to take action.

Robbins, Anthony

20.

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

Proverb, Spanish

21.

You possess a potent force that you either use, or misuse, hundreds of times every day.

Kohe, J. Martin

22.

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

Tilly

23.

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

24.

Voice of one, voice of none.

Proverb, Italian

25.

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

White, Theodore

26.

The greatest power is often simple patience.

Cossman, E. Joseph

27.

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

Weil, Simone

28.

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

29.

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.

Vaneigem, Raoul

30.

The will is commendable though the ability may be wanting.

Ovid

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Hamilton, Alexander

34.

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

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

35.

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.

Adams, John

36.

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

37.

The law always limits every power it gives.

Hume, David

38.

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

Capone, Al

39.

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.

Stewart L. Udall

40.

The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use - of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public.

Robert F. Kennedy

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

Fuller, Thomas

43.

Every man has enough power left to carry out that of which he is convinced.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

Shakespeare, William

45.

Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.

Colton, Charles Caleb

46.

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

Friedman, Milton

47.

Power's footstool is opinion and his throne the human heart.

Vere, Sir Aubrey De

48.

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

Lao-Tzu

49.

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

50.

He who is firm in will molds the world to himself.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von