Quotes about power

page 17

“There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks ofchallenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.”

“Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.”

“Everything I do is going to contain the message that men who are going to be comfortable with powerful women are going to be more powerful men”

“Love is the most powerful motivator in the world. It spurs mortals to greatness. Their noblest and bravest acts are done for love.”

“… in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.”

“People as old and powerful as he should never be given someone to love. For Anna he would destroy the world.”

“Here's where the real power of generosity comes in. Often, the more we give, the more we receive.”

“Acquaintances, in sort, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.”

“She had not yet decided whether to use her power for good… or for evil.”

“Gods have great power, but only humans have creativity, the power to change history.”

“Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.”

“This is your true self, Tessa. This power is who you are. Whoever loves you now - and you must also love yourself - will love the truth of you.”

“It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.”

“You're never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true.”

“It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.”

“Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”

“An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.”

“What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.”

“Having power is not nearly as important as what you choose to do with it.”

“I’m not strong enough for this,” he whispered in her ear—like he didn’t want anyone to hear that coming out of his mouth. Ever. Running her hands up his powerful back, she held him just as hard. “But I am.”

“Roland could not understand why anyone would want cocaine or any other illegal drug, for that matter, in a world where such a powerful one as sugar was so plentiful and cheap.”

“Women who have power are always feared.”

“Choice is the doorway to our creative power. To unleash this power, we must begin from the state of beingness.”

“There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow.”

“Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.”

“We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.”

“Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows how to read, has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.”

“Many people think that happiness comes from having more power or more money.”

“Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo.”

“It was impossible to get the Dimitri and Tasha thing out of my head, but at least packing and getting ready made sure I didn't devote 100 percent of my brain power to him. More like 95 percent.”

“I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.”

“You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.”

“If I've got the powers of a god, then why am I so…"
"Lame?" Sadie suggested.
"Shut up," I said.”

“All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.”

“No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.”

“All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife…. Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.”

“Control is the basis of all true power. Authority and strength are matters of perception”

“It's not an easy journey, to get to a place where you forgive people. But it is such a powerful place, because it frees you.”

“It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who'd kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her.”

“It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.”

“People tend to rally around power.”

“It's not what you say out of your mouth that determines your life, it's what you whisper to yourself that has the most power!”

“Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties or his possessions.”

“Thought = creation. If these thoughts are attached to powerful emotions (good or bad) that speeds the creation”

“Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power. Life just has to go on!”

“A woman's strength should not be in her role, whatever she chooses to be, but in the power to choose that role.”

“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.”

“Power wears out those who do not have it.”

“No person has ever held all the power. There must be a balance between chaos and order, dark and light. With the Temple magic bound to you, the realms are no longer in balance. The power could change you… and you could change the magic.”

“In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.”

“Placing the blame or judgment on someone else leaves you powerless to change your experience; taking responsibility for your beliefs and judgments gives you the power to change them”

“The drive for power is even less logical than the sex urge… and stronger.”

“Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.”

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.”

“She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.”

“Look at Picasso. O’Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.”

“Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us.”

“One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.”

“Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.”

“Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.”

“Singlemindedness is all-powerful.”

“To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity".”

“Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”

“Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all the power to the few, they will oppress the many.”

“Where we choose to be, where we choose to be--we have the power to determine that in our lives. We cannot reel time backward or forward, but we can take ourselves to the place that defines our being.”

“My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things.”

“… there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.”

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence.
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you always open petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose or if it be your wish to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly
as the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries
rendering death and forever with each breathing”

“The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.”

“But words are more powerful than anything.”

“Money, power, sex… and elephants.”

“The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.”

“You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true.
You may have to work for it, however.”

“Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego, but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions.”

“never overlook the power of simplicity”

“Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.”

“Yet as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog.”

“Grace is the power of the Holy Spirit coming to us free of charge to enable you to do with ease what you could never do on your own with any amount of struggle and effort.”

“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

“Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love-well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.”

“For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity we use it so little.”

“If he had to have strange powers, Aden wished they could have been more like hers. That voodoo voice would have made his life a lot easier; he could have sent certain people (cough Ozzie cough) away with no memory of him.”

“At night too, she puzzled the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind.”

“If God wanted us to act on instinct, we wouldn't have the power of reason.”

“Power isn't everything… its the only thing.”

“And only weaklings… who lack courage and the power to feel they're right when the whole world says they're wrong, ever lose.”

“O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.”

“I’m breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions, because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.”

“With great power comes a great need to take a nap.”

“Dante's poem, Langdon was now reminded, was not so much about the misery of hell as it was about the power of the human spirit to endure any challenge, no matter how daunting.”

“I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.”

“You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel strong. You save people by letting them save you.”

“What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

“words have the power o change us”

“Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.”

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed, but our power to do so is increased.”

“The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.”

“Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.”