Quotes about power
page 60

George Fitzhugh photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995), p. 276

John of Patmos photo
Charles Sanders Peirce photo
Edward Hopper photo
Francis Escudero photo

“On the occasion of the International Women’s Day 2016, I call on all Filipino men, women and the LGBT community to be united as one powerful force in promoting and protecting the Filipino women’s physical and emotional health and overall well-being. As one collective group, we must all work to ensure that discrimination and violence against Filipino women, and all women all over the world, do not happen in any instance. Everyday, discrimination and violence against women in so many forms—visible and invisible, physical and verbal—take place. These acts have deep and lasting effects on the women’s health and well-being. On this day, let us also renew our resolve and commitment to uphold, advance and protect our achievements in making the Philippine society more sensitive to the issues affecting the lives of Filipino women. More work needs to be done to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment, factors seen by experts as associated with discrimination and violence. Let us do everything within our power and might to stop all forms of discrimination and violence against women, that their rights are protected and upheld, and that they optimally enjoy and achieve the possible maximum standard of physical and emotion health.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2016, March 8). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153923936700610/
2016, Facebook

“Never underestimate the power of spiritual expression. It is the power of fusion, bringing and holding all things together in the true design in the creative process.”

Martin Cecil, 7th Marquess of Exeter (1909–1988) Marquess of Exeter

The Third Sacred School, Volume 7, Chapter 80
As of a Trumpet, On Eagle's Wings, The Third Sacred School

Walter Rauschenbusch photo
Amartya Sen photo
Vyasa photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Peter F. Drucker photo
Robert Louis Stevenson photo
Nicholas D. Kristof photo
Carlos Menem photo

“Power is not an inheritable good.”

Carlos Menem (1930) Argentine politician who was President of Argentina from 1989 to 1999

Página 12: La parábola de El Jefe http://www.pagina12.com.ar/imprimir/diario/elpais/1-19395-2003-04-27.html.

Michael Elmore-Meegan photo
Ralph Nader photo

“Politics does not bother corporate power. Whoever wins, they win. Both parties represent Wall Street over Main Street. Wall Street is embedded in the federal government.”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

As interviewed by Chris Hedges in "Welcome to 1984," May 14, 2016 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/welcome_to_1984_20160514

Ernest Barnes photo
Georg Brandes photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Harold Macmillan photo

“It is always a matter of regret from the personal point of view when divergences arise between colleagues, but it is the team that matters and not the individual, and I am quite happy about the strength and the power of the team, and so I thought the best thing to do was to settle up these little local difficulties, and then turn to the wider vision of the Commonwealth.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

"Mr Macmillan sets out", The Times, 8 January 1958, p. 8
Statement to the press at Heathrow Airport, 7 January 1958. Macmillan was refusing to postpone a Commonwealth tour despite the resignation of the entire Treasury team of ministers.
1920s-1950s

Bernard Lewis photo
Andrei Sakharov photo
Heather Brooke photo

“It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

The Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/the-lives-of-others-heather-brookes-new-book-opens-up-further-fronts-in-the-war-to-set-information-free-1939295.html - "The lives of others: Heather Brooke's new book opens up further fronts in the war to set information free", 9 April 2010.
Attributed, In the Media

Tim Berners-Lee photo
Toshio Shiratori photo

“…the three Powers, discarding the ideologies of individualism and democracy, have adopted the principle of dealing with human society from the totalitarian point of view.”

Toshio Shiratori (1887–1949) Japanese politician

Quoted in "Honorable Enemy" - Page 258 - by Ernest O. Hauser - 1941.

“There is more power in the open hand than in the clenched fist.”

Herbert N. Casson (1869–1951) Canadian journalist and writer

Herbert N. Casson cited in: The International Chemical Worker Vol. 13-15 (1953). p. 192
1950s and later

Ali Khamenei photo

“The great powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and… installed the Zionist cancerous tumor in the heart of the Islamic world… Many of the problems facing the Muslim world are due to the existence of the Zionist regime.”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

August 19, 2012 speech marking Eid al-Fitr, the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan http://www.timesofisrael.com/khamenei-israeli-a-malignant-zionist-tumor/
2012

Salma Hayek photo
Louise Burfitt-Dons photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Leopoldo Alas photo

“Only virtue has powerful arguments against pessimism.”

Leopoldo Alas (1852–1901) novelist

Sólo la virtud tiene argumentos poderosos contra el pesimismo.
Source: Leopoldo Alas (1975) Solos de Clarín.; Also attributed without citation at Frases Célebres http://frasescelebresmajo.blogspot.com/2011/09/leopoldo-alas-clarin.html

Glen Cook photo

“There was one temporal power greater than the greatest sorcery. Greed.”

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 23, “Glittering Stone: Fortress with No Name” (p. 448)

James Russell Lowell photo

“Simple as it seems, it was a great discovery that the key of knowledge could turn both ways, that it could open, as well as lock, the door of power to the many.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), New England Two Centuries Ago

Aleister Crowley photo

“Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.”

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

This has been attributed to Crowley on the internet, but without citation. No incidents of it in Crowley's works have as yet been located.
This was quoted as an "occult tradition" in Fundamentals of Experimental Psychology (1976) by Charles Lawrence Sheridan, p. 17, but without any reference to Crowley.
Disputed
Variant: Knowledge is power and knowledge shared is power lost.

Clement Attlee photo

“My noble friend Lord Morrison of Lambeth rather suggested that it was a really good Socialist policy to join up with these countries. I do not think that comes into it very much. They are not Socialist countries, and the object, so far as I can see, is to set up an organisation with a tariff against the rest of the world within which there shall be the freest possible competition between, capitalist interests. That might be a kind of common ideal. I daresay that is why it is supported by the Liberal Party. It is not a very good picture for the future…I believe in a planned economy. So far as I can see, we are to a large extent losing our power to plan as we want and submitting not to a Council of Ministers but a collection of international civil servants, able and honest, no doubt, but not necessarily having the best future of this country at heart…I think we are parting, to some extent at all events, with our powers to plan our own country in the way we desire. I quite agree that that plan should fit in, as far as it can, with a world plan. That is a very different thing from submitting our plans to be planned by a body of international civil servants, no doubt excellent men. I may be merely insular, but I have no prejudice in a Britain planned for the British by the British. Therefore, as at present advised, I am quite unconvinced either that it is necessary or that it is even desirable that we should go into the Common Market.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1962/aug/02/britain-and-the-common-market in the House of Lords on the British application to join the Common Market (2 August 1962).
Later life

Adolf Hitler photo
Nicholas of Cusa photo
W. Somerset Maugham photo

“She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

Source: A Writer's Notebook (1946), p. 189

Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar photo
George William Curtis photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Zisi photo
Jan Smuts photo
Hilaire Belloc photo

“Even where the Faith is preserved men pursue wealth and power inordinately. Where the Faith is lost they pursue nothing else.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: Survivals and New Arrivals (1929), Ch. III Survivals (iii) The "Wealth and Power" Argument

Thomas Martin Lindsay photo

“After the Council of Nicea, … the State supported the associated churches by all the means in its power. It recognized the decisions of their councils and enforced them with civil pains and penalties; it also recognized the sentences of deposition and excommunication passed on members of the clergy or laity belonging to any one of the associated churches and followed them with civil disabilities. It did its best to destroy all Christianity outside of the associated churches, and largely succeeded. The rigour of the state persecution directed against Christian nonconformists in the fourth and fifth centuries has not received the attention due to it. The state confiscated their churches and ecclesiastical property (sometimes their private property also); it prohibited under penalty of proscription and death their meeting for public worship; it took from the nonconformist Christians the right to inherit or bequeath property by will; it banished their clergy; finally, it made raids upon them by its soldiery and sometimes butchered whole communities, as was the case with the Montanists in Phrygia and with the Donatists in Africa. And this glaringly un-Christian mode of creating and vindicating the visible unity of the Catholic Church of Christ was vigorously encouraged by the leaders of the associated churches who had the recognition and support of the State.”

Thomas Martin Lindsay (1843–1914) Scottish historian, professor and principal of the Free Church College, Glasgow

The Church and the Ministry in the Early Centuries (1903), p. 360 http://books.google.com/books?id=IvUsAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA360

Leo Tolstoy photo
Robert Sarah photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, July, (21 July 2016)

Helmut Schmidt photo

“Of course, nuclear power has its risks. But there is no power and nothing in the world without risks, not even love.”

Helmut Schmidt (1918–2015) Chancellor of West Germany 1974-1982

Zeit Online http://www.zeit.de/online/2008/30/schmidt-atomausstieg-spd, 23. July 2008

“The development of the Watt governor for steam engines, which adapted the power output of the engine automatically to the load by means of feedback, consolidated the first Industrial Revolution.”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 6, The Viable Governor, p. 142.

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery photo
Elizabeth I of England photo
James Anthony Froude photo
Henry Mintzberg photo
Henrik Ibsen photo
Indro Montanelli photo

“[…] the love of power excludes all others.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

I protagonisti, Rizzoli, 1976, p. 265.
1950s - 1990s

C. N. R. Rao photo
Émile Durkheim photo
David Icke photo
Rem Koolhaas photo

“Architecture is a dangerous mixture of power and impotence.”

Rem Koolhaas (1944) Dutch architect (b.1944)

From S,M,L,XL, New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995

KT Tunstall photo
Michelle Obama photo

“To all the young women here tonight, and all across the country, let me say those words again: Black girls rock! We rock! We rock! No matter who you are, no matter where you come from, you are beautiful, you are powerful, you are brilliant, you are funny! Let me tell you, I'm so proud of you. My husband, your president, is so proud of you. And we have such big hopes and dreams for every single one of you.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

Speech at BET's 2015 Black Girls Rock! event (28 March 2015) http://uk.eonline.com/news/640752/michelle-obama-offers-inspirational-words-at-2015-black-girls-rock-find-out-what-she-said
2010s

Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV photo
Tim Flannery photo
William Wordsworth photo

“A power is passing from the earth.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Source: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Lines on the expected Dissolution of Mr. Fox.

Mohammad Emami-Kashani photo

“By using power, money, fraud, the enemy is interested in gaining control over the world of Islam.”

Mohammad Emami-Kashani (1937) Iranian politician

Friday Sermon at Tehran University by Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani. http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/60.htm May 2004.

Charles Lyell photo
Charles James Fox photo
Ben Croshaw photo
Julian Assange photo

“Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find. If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes. The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

[Witnessing, 2007-01-03, 2012-08-16, http://web.archive.org/web/20071020051936/http://iq.org/#Witnessing]

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Henry Mintzberg photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Michel Foucault photo

“After the first powerful plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"The Express" (l. 1–3) in Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1988) edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair

Georges Clemenceau photo

“[Clemenceau] said that the Rhine was a natural boundary of Gaul and Germany and that it ought to be made the German boundary now, the territory between the Rhine and the French frontier being made into an Independent State whose neutrality should be guaranteed by the great powers.”

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French politician

Quoted in a letter from the British Ambassador Lord Derby to Lord Balfour (14 December 1918), quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 337.
Prime Minister

Calvin Coolidge photo
George W. Bush photo
Cristoforo Colombo photo
Eric Berne photo
Lewis Pugh photo

“The most powerful form of self-belief comes from believing in something greater than you. Because when you’ve got purpose, everything becomes possible.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

p 86
21 Yaks And A Speedo (2013)

James Wilde, 1st Baron Penzance photo
Daniel J. Boorstin photo

“Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio —- empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how —- has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. … Here at home —- within the family, so to speak —- our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

Foreword to America and the image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought, Meridian Books, 1960, as cited in: Robert Andrews (1993) The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations https://books.google.com/books?id=4cl5c4T9LWkC&lpg=PA207&dq=Our%20attitude%20toward%20our%20own%20culture%20has%20recently%20been%20characterized%20by%20two%20qualities%2C%20braggadocio%20and%20petulance.&pg=PA207#v=onepage&q&f=false, Columbia University Press, p. 207.

John Maynard Keynes photo
Jacob Bronowski photo
Adi Da Samraj photo
Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

“I think the women, therefore, must be concerned with these values, and I return to my statement that if a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Remarks at Fourth Annual Republican Women's National Conference (6 March 1956) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10746
1950s

John Jay photo

“No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent.”

John Jay (1745–1829) American politician and a founding father of the United States

Address to the People of Great Britain https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Address_to_the_People_of_Great_Britain, drafted by Jay and approved by the First Continental Congress on 21 October 1774 ; as contained in American Eloquence: A Collection of Speeches and Addresses by the Most Eminent Orators of America, Volume 1, ed. Frank Moore, D. Appleton (1872), p. 159
1770s

Alexis De Tocqueville photo