Motivational Quotes

Power

The great secret of power is never to will to do more than you can accomplish.

- Henrik Ibsen

Best Quotes about Power

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let everyone know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.

James A. Garfield

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

Proverb, Yiddish

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

Morgenthau, Hans J.

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

White, Theodore

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

Kazantzakis, Nikos

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.

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.

John Lehman

10.

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

Banks, Harry F.

11.

The point of power is always in the present moment.

Hay, Louise L.

12.

By time and council do the best we can: The event is never in the power of man.

Herrich

13.

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

Seneca

14.

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

15.

Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.

Proverb, Chinese

16.

The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.

Bevan, Aneurin

17.

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

Weil, Simone

18.

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

19.

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

Stephen Vincent Benet

20.

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

Proverb

21.

Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

22.

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

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

25.

The will is deaf and hears no heedful friends.

Shakespeare, William

26.

All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest. Howsoever, he that for want of will or wit useth not those means, must rest in servitude and poverty.

Raleigh, Sir Walter

27.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

All the power that we exercise over others depends on the power we exercise over ourselves.

Cotvos

30.

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

Haliburton, Thomas C.

31.

Self-will so ardent and active that it will break a world to pieces to make a stool to sit on.

Cecil, Richard

32.

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Kissinger, Henry

33.

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

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

34.

No emperor has the power to dictate to the heart.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

35.

Give me a lever long enough, and a prop strong enough, I can single-handed move the world.

Archimedes

36.

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.

Stewart L. Udall

37.

Napoleon for the sake of a good name broke in pieces half the world.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

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

Harry Shearer

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The secret of all power is - save your force. If you want high pressure you must choke off waste.

Joseph Farrell

42.

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

Barthes, Roland

43.

Will it, and set to work briskly.