quotations about power
But whatever gives power is also potentially dangerous. What can make others anxious is a potentially destructive power; and if it can harm others it might also destroy its owner.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Symbolic Wounds
You have seen power in its various forms--a benign deity, when exercised in the suppression of fraud, injustice, and tyranny, but a demon, when united with unbounded ambition--a wide-wasting fury, who has destroyed her thousands. Not an age of the world but has produced characters, to which whole human hecatombs have been sacrificed.
ABIGAIL ADAMS
letter to John Quincy Adams, December 26, 1783
What elements of power we wield! Truth unmixed with error, flashing as God's own lightning in its brightness, resistless if properly wielded, as that living flame!
T. M. EDDY
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
To come under siege ... was the inevitable fate of power.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune Messiah
The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
What Desires Are Politically Important?
Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.
TOBIAS WOLFF
This Boy's Life
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
MARGARET THATCHER
U. S. News & World Report, vol. 104
The natural destiny of power is fragmentation.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
What Desires Are Politically Important?
Power, like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation. To acquire it, appears not more difficult than to be dispossessed of it when acquired, since it enables the holder to shift his own errors on dependents, and to take their merits to himself. But the miracle of losing it vanishes, when we reflect that we are as liable to fall as to rise, by the treachery of others; and that to say "I am" is language that has been appropriated exclusively to God!
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.
JAMES MADISON
attributed, The Great Quotations
Many have turned an eager ear to the siren call of power--and found themselves drowning instead.
ROY THOMAS & CLARA NOTO
Red Sonja, vol. 1, no. 3
Power? It's like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.
HAROLD MACMILLAN
attributed, The New Anatomy of Britain
Power is ever stealing from the many to the few; the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day, or it is rotten.
WENDELL PHILLIPS
Lectures and Speeches
Dim with the mist of years, gray flits the shade of power.
LORD BYRON
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
The worst thing that can be said of the most powerful, is that they can take your life; but the same thing can be said of the most weak.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Power tires only those who do not have it.
GIULIO ANDREOTTI
London Independent, April 5, 1992
Never doubt what small men will do for great power.
PAOLO BACIGALUPI
The Windup Girl
Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.
EURIPIDES
The Bacchæ
The supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous character.
JAMES FRAZER
The Golden Bough