power quotes

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn:

You can have power over people as 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.

Audre Lorde:

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

Blaise Pascal:

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Carl Jung:

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Carl Sagan:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Casey Miller and Kate Swift:

From antiquity, people have recognized the connection between naming and power.

Cesar Chavez:

The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.

Charles A. Beard:

All the lessons of history in four sentences:
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Elie Wiesel:

It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is nor an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment

Elizabeth Arden:

Dear, never forget one little point. It's my business. You just work here. (to her husband)

Elizabeth Dole:

We have learned that power is a positive force if it is used for positive purposes.

Freda Adler:

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

Frederick Douglass:

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Frederick Douglass:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Frederick Douglass:

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

George Bernard Shaw:

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

Gloria Steinem:

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

Goethe:

Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.

Henry Clay:

The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments. [1834]

Herbert Marcuse:

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

Jacob Bronowski:

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

James Russell Lowell:

Wealth may be an excellent thing, for it means power, and it means leisure, it means liberty.

Jean Anouilh:

God is on everyone's side … and in the last analysis, he is on the side with plenty of money and large armies.

Jimi Hendrix:

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

Joan B. Campbell:

[Jesus'] ministry was clearly defined, and the alternatives to the illusion and temptations of the desert were spelled out. A choice was made -- life abundant, full, and free for all. Make no mistake about it, the day that choice was made, Jesus became suspect. That day in the temple he sealed the fate already prepared for him. How was the world to understand one who rejected an offer of power and control?
Sojourners, August-September, 1991


John Adams:

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

Kenneth Patton:

The right is not created in the exercise of power, but if the right does not have the power to become established, then power will rule of itself.

Lord Acton:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

Margaret J. Wheatley:

When leaders take back power, when they act as heroes and saviors, they end up exhausted, overwhelmed, and deeply stressed.

Marian Wright Edelman:

Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.

Mohandas Gandhi:

I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.

Nadine Gordimer:

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

Paulo Freire:

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

Plato:

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Rabindranath Tagore:

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

Rachel Carson:

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Everything in nature contains all the power of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

Shulamith Firestone:

Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle.

Stephen Vincent Benét:

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

Theodore Bikel:

All too often arrogance accompanies strength, and we must never assume that justice is on the side of the strong. The use of power must always be accompanied by moral choice.

Thomas Jefferson:

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

Thomas Jefferson:

I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education.

William E. Gladstone :

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.