Quotes about power
page 17

“No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make.”

Source: Life Expectancy

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

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Source: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

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

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Selfishness

“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”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

Women, Men

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

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Variant: My point is that love is the most powerful motivator in the world. It spurs mortals to greatness. Their noblest, bravest acts are done for love.
Source: The Lost Hero

Love, World, Motivation

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

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

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

Patricia Briggs book Fair Game

Source: Fair Game

Love, People, World

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

Debbie Macomber (1948) American writer

Source: One Simple Act: Discovering the Power of Generosity

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

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: 引爆趨勢 : 小改變如何引發大流行 [Yin bao qu shi: xiao gai bian ru he yin fa da liu xing]

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

Anne Taintor (1953) American artist

Evil

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

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

God, History, Change

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

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 17 (p. 561)

Change

“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.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Love, Truth

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

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Time

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

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Variant: You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.
Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

Dreams

“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.”

Robert Silverberg Dying Inside

Source: Dying Inside

World, Color, Time

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

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 3
Context: The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. 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.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Pleasure, Feeling, Exercises

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

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography

Way

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

Roald Dahl (1916–1990) British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter

“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.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: The King

Strong

“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.”

Stephen King book The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three

Source: The Drawing of the Three

World, Understanding

“Women who have power are always feared.”

Libba Bray A Great and Terrible Beauty

Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Women, Fear

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

Ilchi Lee (1950) South Korean businessman

Source: Human Technology: A Toolkit for Authentic Living

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

Orison Swett Marden (1850–1924) American writer

Hope, Powerful, Hope

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

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer

Source: Beowulf

People

“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.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Love, Parting

“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.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: Jesting Pilate

Life, Money, Way, Reading

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

François Lelord book Hector and the Search for Happiness

Source: Hector and the Search for Happiness

Money, People, Thinking, Happiness

“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.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Source: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“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.”

Richelle Mead book Frostbite

Source: Frostbite

“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.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

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

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

Future

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

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

God

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

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

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

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Give Me Liberty (1936)
Context: The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.

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.”

Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) English children's writer and illustrator

Source: Merry Christmas, Peter Rabbit!

Religion

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

Brandon Sanderson book Words of Radiance

Source: Words of Radiance

“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.”

Tyler Perry (1966) American actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, producer, author, and songwriter

Powerful, People, Forgiveness

“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.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Death, Family

“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.”

Marya Hornbacher book Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“People tend to rally around power.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

People

“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!”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Inspirational, Motivational, Positive, Back To Work

“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.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Personality

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

Rhonda Byrne book The Secret

Source: The Secret

Speed

“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!”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Life, Wisdom

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

Brandon Sanderson book Words of Radiance

Source: Words of Radiance

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

Guy Debord book The Society of the Spectacle

Source: The Society of the Spectacle

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

Mario Puzo (1920–1999) American Novelist

“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.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

Light, Change, Personality

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

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Source: On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

World, Silence

“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”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Change

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

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

Sex

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

Robert Harris (1957) novelist

Source: Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome

“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.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

369
Popular version of the first sentence: "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule it."
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Source: Minority Report

Chance, Parting, Falseness

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

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“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.”

Marisha Pessl (1977) American writer

Source: Night Film

People, Personality, Happiness

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

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Women

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

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

God, Universe

“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.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Decision, Change

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

Chuck Klosterman book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

Source: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

Personality

“Singlemindedness is all-powerful.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto (1659–1719) Samurai

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

Roland Barthes book A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Age, Waiting

“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.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Guide to Kulchur (1938), p. 55
Variant: Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand.

Books, Light, Reading

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

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) Founding Father of the United States

“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.”

Sena Jeter Naslund (1942) American writer

Source: Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer

Time

“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.”

John Marsden (1950) author

Source: A Killing Frost

Feeling, Imagination, Memory

“… 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.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Truth, Heart

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

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

“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”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

W [ViVa] (1931) LVII

Life, Death, World, Travel

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Winter Dreams

Source: Winter Dreams

“But words are more powerful than anything.”

Jennifer Donnelly A Northern Light

Source: A Northern Light

“Money, power, sex… and elephants.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Memory

Source: Memory

Money, Sex

“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.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Source: Diaries of Franz Kafka

People, Sister, Personality

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

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
Variant: You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true.
Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

“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.”

Steve Wozniak (1950) American inventor, computer engineer and programmer

People, Help

“never overlook the power of simplicity”

Robin S. Sharma (1965) Canadian self help writer

Source: The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams Reaching Your Destiny

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

Leo Rosten (1908–1997) American writer

“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.”

Philip Yancey (1949) American writer

God, World, Birth, Reading

“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.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

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.”

Hunter S. Thompson book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Source: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

God

“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.”

Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller

Source: The Storyteller

Love, Hunger, Revenge

“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.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

Sense, Memory

“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.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Intertwined

Life, People, Memory

“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.”

Anaïs Nin book A Spy in the House of Love

Source: A Spy in the House of Love

Girl, Lovers, Night, Wealth

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

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Mercy

God

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

Mario Puzo book The Last Don

Source: The Last Don

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

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948) Novelist, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald

World, Feeling, Courage

“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.”

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) Scots poet, novelist and literary critic

Books, Flowers, Winter, Summer

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

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

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

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Variant: With great power... comes need to take a nap. Wake me up later
Source: The Last Olympian

“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.”

Dan Brown book Inferno

Source: Inferno

Hell

“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.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

As quoted in Shout! (1981) by Philip Norman, p. 365; and in An Encyclopedia of Quotations about Music (1981) by Nat Shapiro, p. 303

God

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

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

People, Feeling, Strong

“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.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)
Context: Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. … Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites — polar opposites — so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.
It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we've got to get this thing right. 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. And this is what we must see as we move on. What has happened is that we have had it wrong and confused in our own country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience.
This is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

Peaceful, Love, Justice

“words have the power o change us”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Clockwork Angel; Clockwork Prince; Clockwork Princess

Change