POWER QUOTES III
quotations about power
Wealth is power, and power is the only thing about which contemporary culture cares.
DEAN KOONTZ
Brother Odd
Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the understanding.
NICHOLAS BLACK ELK
The Sacred Pipe
The impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.
ERIC HOFFER
The Ordeal of Change
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 JUNG
The Psychology of the Unconscious
Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Self Reliance", Essays
O how feeble is man's power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
Nor a lost hour recall!
JOHN DONNE
song
Goodness and supreme power do not agree together.
LUCANUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
People with real power never fear of losing it. People with control think of little else.
JOSS WHEDON
"Mom, He's Doing It Again", Whedonesque, November 10, 2007
Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
Circular to the States, May 9, 1753
Absolute power was not meant for man.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in striking true.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who ... have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Unused power was like a marionette with visible strings, nobody holding them. A compelling attraction: I could make it dance.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
All human power is a compound of time and patience.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Eugénie Grandet
Unlimited power should not be trusted in the hands of anyone who is not endued with a perfection more than human.
J. VEITCH
attributed, Day's Collacon
Men in great place are thrice servants; servants of the sovereign state, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.
JOHN LOCKE
"Of Great Place", The Conduct of the Understanding: Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political
True power comes when others offer it to you and you merely accept it as a gift, not as the spoils of some personal war.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Narcissus in Chains
That power is in vain which is never in use.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual. Reality always creeps in--the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Existential Psychotherapy