Motivational Quotes

Power

Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.

- Proverb, Chinese

Best Quotes about Power

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Fromm, Erich

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.

John Lehman

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

Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of strength.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

Power tires only those who do not have it.

Andreotti, Giulio

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

Proverb, Yiddish

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

Proverb, Spanish

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

10.

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

Steinem, Gloria

11.

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

Seneca

12.

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

13.

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.

Stewart L. Udall

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Lord Acton

17.

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

Aeschylus

18.

Will cannot be quenched against its will.

Dante Alighieri

19.

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

20.

A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it.

Rostand, Jean

21.

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

22.

Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.

Proverb, Chinese

23.

To create power is like a magnet, this is true because this creative power operates like a magnet. Give it a strong clear picture of what you want and this creative power starts to work magnetizing conditions about you -- attracting to you things, resources, opportunities, circumstances and even the people you need, to help bring to pass in your outer life what you have pictured.

Bristol, Claude M.

24.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

Capone, Al

26.

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.

Genet, Jean

27.

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

Friedman, Milton

28.

Power gravitates to the man who knows how.

Marden, Orison Swett

29.

Our power is not so much in us as through us.

Fosdick, Harry Emerson

30.

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

31.

Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

32.

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

Barthes, Roland

33.

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

34.

Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

Shakespeare, William

35.

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

Alinsky, Saul

36.

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

Rand, Ayn

37.

The law always limits every power it gives.

Hume, David

38.

The one who wills is the one who can.

Proverb

39.

There are powers inside of you which, if you could discover and use, would make of you everything you ever dreamed or imagined you could become.

Marden, Orison Swett

40.

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

41.

Will it, and set to work briskly.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

42.

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

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

43.

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

44.

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

Byrnes, James F.

45.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

46.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

Jefferson, Thomas

47.

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