Quotes about power
page 71

“In the case of a novel, or any imaginative work, especially if the tone is poetic, my own preference is for ending with a touch of symbolism which shall leave the reader brooding. A fine novel, a well-written story, "proves" nothing. Certain characters have played their parts, life goes on, and the final passage may be allowed to remain with one foot in the air, as is the case with some of Chopin's conclusions. But there is no absolute rule in such matters, and there are epic novelists who like to end on a powerful crescendo, as Ravel does in Bolero, or Dvorak in the New-World Symphony. Composition has features which are common to all the arts, and the author can learn as much about his business in the concert hall as in the library.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Life, World, Art, Imagination

“time in an allegory of itself imparts to us lessons of wisdom which the moment they are formulated are immediately destroyed by the merest flickers of light or shadow which are nothing more than time in its incarnations and disincarnations which are the phrases that I am writing on this paper and that disappears as I read them:
they are not the sensations, the perceptions, the mental images, and the thoughts which flare up and die away here, now, as I write or as I read what I write: they are not what I see or what I have seen, they are the reverse of what is seen and of the power of sight—but they are not the invisible: they are the unsaid residuum;
they are not the other side of reality but, rather, the other side of language, what we have on the tip of our tongue that vanishes before it is said, the other side that cannot be named because it is the opposite of a name:
what is not said is not this or that which we leave unsaid, nor is it neither-this-nor-that: it is not the tree that I say I see but the sensation that I feel on sensing that I see it at the moment when I am just about to say that I see it, an insubstantial but real conjunction of vibrations and sounds and meanings that on being combined suggest the configuration of a green-bronze-black-woody-leafy-sonorous-silent presence;
no, it is not that either, if it is not a name it surely cannot be the description of a name or the description of the sensation of the name or the name of the sensation:
a tree is not the name tree, nor is it the sensation of tree: it is the sensation of a perception of tree that dies away at the very moment of the perception of the sensation of tree;
names, as we already know, are empty, but what we did not know, or if we did know, had forgotten, is that sensations are perceptions of sensations that die away, sensations that vanish on becoming perceptions, since if they were not perceptions, how would we know that they are sensations?;
sensations that are not perceptions are not sensations, perceptions that are not names—what are they?
if you didn’t know it before, you know now: everything is empty;
and the moment I say everything-is-empty, I am aware that I am falling into a trap: if everything is empty, this everything-is-empty is empty too;
no, it is full, full to overflowing, everything-is-empty is replete with itself, what we touch and see and taste and smell and think, the realities that we invent and the realities that touch us, look at us, hear us, and invent us, everything that we weave and unweave and everything that weaves and unweaves us, momentary appearances and disappearances, each one different and unique, is always the same full reality, always the same fabric that is woven as it is unwoven: even total emptiness and utter privation are plenitude (perhaps they are the apogee, the acme, the consummation and the calm of plenitude), everything is full to the brim, everything is real, all these invented realities and all these very real inventions are full of themselves, each and every one of them, replete with their own reality;
and the moment I say this, they empty themselves: things empty themselves and names fill themselves, they are no longer empty, names are plethoras, they are donors, they are full to bursting with blood, milk, semen, sap, they are swollen with minutes, hours, centuries, pregnant with meanings and significations and signals, they are the secret signs that time makes to itself, names suck the marrow from things, things die on this page but names increase and multiply, things die in order that names may live:”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 9

Wisdom, Secret, Feeling, Thinking

“Perhaps His experiment went spectacularly wrong, sir. Perhaps He's just baffled. Seeing the mess, not knowing how to put it right. Perhaps not wanting to put it right. Perhaps He only had enough power left for one final intervention. So He made it. Whoever He is, whatever He is, I hope he burns in His own Hell.”

P. D. James book The Children of Men

A driver upon being asked if he believed in God.
The Children of Men (1992)

Hope, Hell

“Gentlemen, I say to you this discrimination must cease. We are determined to fight this question; we believe the Constitution gives us this right. All of the fifteen amendments made to the Constitution run down in one single line of protecting the rights of the citizens of this country. One after another of those amendments give these rights to citizens; step by step these rights are secured to them. And now we say to you that if you will not obey the Constitution, then the power is given by that Constitution for the enactment of such a law as will have a tendency to enforce the provisions thereof.”

Joseph Hayne Rainey (1832–1887) politician

1873, Speech on Civil Rights Act (1873)

Law, Question, Fight, Country

“Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. 113

People, Change

“I have never been a supporter of or an apologist for Saddam Hussein. Indeed, I recall many lonely occasions in the House when I spoke against Saddam Hussein, his genocide against the Kurdish people and the way that the British Government were financing the re-arming of Iraq. Indeed, the chemical weapons being manufactured in Iraq largely comprise chemicals made in western Europe and north America. Some £1 billion was loaned to Saddam Hussein by British banks, with the agreement of the British Government. His power is largely the creation of western Europe and north America. I do not support him and I do not think that he was right to invade Kuwait…The only purpose of sending troops to the region is to defend and guarantee oil supplies. I find it difficult to accept that the United States is merely defending a small country against a larger country. If that were true, why were Grenada and Panama invaded? What was the Vietnam war about, other than a powerful United States wishing to extend its control and influence throughout the world? …If the shooting starts and there is war in the Gulf, the retaking of Kuwait will not be a clean, clinical operation—it will be a filthy and long war with hundreds of thousands of dead, and at the end of that war there will still have to be negotiations on the future order and the future government of that area and those countries.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/nov/07/first-day in the House of Commons (7 November 1990). <br class="br">1990s

War, People, World, Way

“Power without the fear of enquiry is like pickles without salt that would degenerate into a pit of worms. The fear of enquiry is the body guard of power administration.”

D. V. Gundappa (1887–1975) Indian writer

In page=20
D.V. Gundappa,Sahitya Akademi

Fear

“This Spring of 1911 Marianne von Werefkin [his former study-mate in Russia and in fact his life-comapnion for many years, but never married] Andrei, Helene and I went to Prerow on the Baltic [coast]. For me that summer meant a great step forward in my art. I painted my finest landscapes there as well as large figure paintings in powerful, glowing colours and not at all naturalistic or objective. I used a great deal of red, blue, orange, cadmium yellow and chromium-oxide green. My forms were very strongly contoured in Prussian blue, and came with tremendous power from an inner ecstasy. 'Der Buckel', 'Violetter Turban', 'Selbstporträt'.... were created in this way. It was a turning-point in my art. It was in these years, up to 1914, just before the war [World War 1. ], that I painted my most powerful works, referred to as the pré-war works.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

Quote c. 1911; in 'Lebenserinnerungen', 1938; as cited in Alexej von Jawlensky, Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen, Rotterdam; exhibition catalog 25/9 – 27/11-1994 (a. o. his life quotes from ['Life Memories'] he dictated late in his life, in 1938)
1900 - 1935

Life, War, World, Art

“The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

“Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Points of Rebellion (1969)
Other speeches and writings

Law, Way

“The sailing flight of birds is the only form of flight which is carried on for some length of time without the expenditure of power.”

Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896) German aviation pioneer

The Romance of Aeronautics (1912)

Bird, Time

“The church buys the possibility of maintaining itself sat the price of concessions. … In so doing it disavows its martyrs. [Martyrs] want to obey God, not men. But the church trades its support for advantages, honors, titles and money. It comes under the rule of mammon. Finally, it lets itself be bought so as to gain facilities for its celebrations, its evangelism, its good works, its preaching of the good Word. But Satan rejoices at all this, for as this gospel is not based on the cornerstone, on Jesus Christ, but on the power of the world thanks to which it is propagated.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 127

Men, Money, God, World

“The gentleman knows that whatever is imperfect and unrefined does not deserve praise. … He makes his eyes not want to see what is not right, makes his ears not want to hear what is not right, makes his mouth not want to speak what is not right, and makes his heart not want to deliberate over what is not right. … For this reason, power and profit cannot sway him, the masses cannot shift him, and nothing in the world can shake him.”

Xun Zi (-313–-238 BC) Ancient Chinese philosopher

Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 260
An Exhortation to Learning

World, Heart

“Verily God is able to convert light into fire whenever He pleaseth; surely He is potent over all things. And were He to declare a person whom ye regard alien to the truth as being akin thereto, err not by questioning His decision in your fancies, for He Who is the Sovereign Truth createth things through the power of His behest. Verily God transmuteth fire into light as He willeth, and indeed potent is He over all things. Consider ye how the truth shone forth as truth in the First Day and how error became manifest as error; so likewise shall ye distinguish them from each other on the Day of Resurrection.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

XVII, 4
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

God, Truth, Error, Question

“Quantum mechanics is the most useful and powerful theory physicists have ever devised. Yet today, nearly 90 years after its formulation, disagreement about the meaning of the theory is stronger than ever. New interpretations appear every year. None ever disappear. … The message from QBism is this: You needn't feel guilty about never getting nervous about this stuff. You were right not to be bothered. But for the sake of intellectual coherence, you had better reexamine what you wrongly may have thought you understood perfectly well about the nature of probability.”

David Mermin (1935) American physicist

Fixing the shifty split http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.1618, Physics Today, Volume 65, Issue 7, July 2012, p. 8

Feeling, Nature, Appearance

“The moment we recognize God as supreme in power and infinitely good and loving toward all His intelligent creatures, that moment we admit the doctrine of universal and special providence.”

Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–1881) Novelist, poet, editor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 279.

Love, God, Intelligence, Universe

“The House of Commons has lifted our affairs above the mechanical sphere into the human sphere. It thrives on criticism, it is perfectly impervious to newspaper abuse or taunts from any quarter, and it is capable of digesting almost anything or almost any body of gentlemen, whatever be the views with which they arrive. There is no situation to which it cannot address itself with vigour and ingenuity. It is the citadel of British liberty; it is the foundation of our laws; its traditions and its privileges are as lively today as when it broke the arbitrary power of the Crown and substituted that Constitutional Monarchy under which we have enjoyed so many blessings.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, October 28, 1943 "House of Commons Rebuilding" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/oct/28/house-of-commons-rebuilding#column_405. <br class="br">The Second World War (1939–1945)

Law, Housing

“To enter your Castle (soul) is not a journey that takes you away from the world; rather it brings you directly into the world. It brings you fully into your soul, and into your power in the world…Mystics change the world around them more dramatically and more positively than can ever be measured. The mystic works on the invisible plane, relying on God, prayer and grace.”

Caroline Myss (1952) author from the United States

Entering the Castle : An Inner Path to God and Your Soul (2007), p. 85

God, World, Soul, Change

“"Peace Train" is a song I wrote, the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions. There is a powerful need for people to feel that gust of hope rise up again. As a member of humanity and as a Muslim, this is my contribution to the call for a peaceful solution.”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

"Yusuf Islam Takes Stance for Peace" by Ali Asadullah at IslamOnline http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&pagename=Zone-English-ArtCulture%2FACELayout&cid=1158658359693

People, Peace, Hope, Feeling

“…'world peace' imposed by a dominant power assisted by a few partners is unlikely… only world peace driven by a recognition of the threat to everyone's survival is the most likely source of salvation…”

Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928–2017) Polish-American political scientist

Time, The Answers Issue (July 2015), p. 49.

World, Peace

“One of the most powerful forms of information is feedback on our own actions.”

John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change

Step 5, p. 116
The Heart of Change, (2002)

“When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) (Opinion of the Court).

Law, Thinking, Freedom, Personality

“Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to describe the best as the common enemy of all decent citizens. But there will be small hope of gaining adherents to this idea so long as government is thought of as an independent and somehow super-human organism, with powers, rights, and privileges transcending those of any other human aggregation.”

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

68
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Hope, Idea, Failure

“In 1993, I made a huge sacrifice: The winner shared power. I sacrificed once again not to take the throne [in 2004], because I think that I have a duty to lead the Funcinpec Party, to protect the members. Who else can make sacrifices like me?”

Norodom Ranariddh (1944) Cambodian politician

[Yun Samean, https://www.cambodiadaily.com/archives/ranariddh-says-he-quit-for-the-nation-sake-52851/, Ranariddh Says He Quit For the Nation Sake, 6 March 2006, 29 June 2015, The Cambodia Daily]

Thinking

“It were doubtless to be wished, that the power of prohibiting the importation of slaves had not been postponed until the year 1808, or rather that it had been suffered to have immediate operation. But it is not difficult to account, either for this restriction on the general government, or for the manner in which the whole clause is expressed. It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy; that within that period, it will receive a considerable discouragement from the federal government, and may be totally abolished, by a concurrence of the few States which continue the unnatural traffic, in the prohibitory example which has been given by so great a majority of the Union. Happy would it be for the unfortunate Africans, if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the oppressions of their European brethren!”

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

Federalist No. 42 http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/quotes/slavery.html <br class="br">1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Happiness, Suffering

“All international laws are made by big, powerful countries but applied only on weaker ones like ours.”

Mahinda Rajapaksa (1945) Prime Minister of Sri Lanka

Interview with Hindustan Times http://www.hindustantimes.com/comment/interviewsnews/full-text-of-ht-s-exclusive-interview-with-lankan-president-rajapaksa/article1-1123091.aspx, September 17, 2013.

Law, Country

“CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Quoted in And I Quote: The Definitive Collection of Quotes, Sayings, and Jokes for the Contemporary Speechmaker (1992) by Ashton Applewhite, Tripp Evans and Andrew Frothingham, p. 279
1990s

War

“The character and conquest of the invincible champion are ever the same. A Lacedaemonian died while writing with his own blood on a rock — " Sparta has conquered!" But, O, there is an illustration higher and better than any derived from mere earthly annals. Jesus veiled His glory in the skies; shrouded divinity in mortality, and with godhead and humanity coalesced in His person, entered the lists with more than mortal strife against the powers of hell. He drank the bitter cup with sublimer resignation than the sages of earth ever knew; contended victoriously where finite champions must inevitably have been destroyed; fell, like the strong man, destroying His foes by His death; persevered on our behalf in all the fearful descent from the august throne of the Eternal to the stony floor of the cold and gloomy sepulchre; that Hope's sweet fountain might gush up for mankind in Golgotha, and Salvation plant her banner with immortal triumph at the portal of the conquered tomb.”

Elias Lyman Magoon (1810–1886) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 451.

Death, Fear, Hope, Hell

“Flute is an instrument which gives you more power as you play. It's like the breathing exercises in yoga. I'm able to increase my lung power by playing more. But because of travelling I don't get time to practice”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia in Hinduism Today

Travel, Exercises, Time

“[Velociraptors] are among my very favourite dinosaurs. Their long upcurved skulls, slender yet compact proportions, and great sickle claws make these elegant, attractive, yet demonic animals. There is nothing else like them. Pound for pound, these are among the most powerful of known predators; certainly no other theropod had such a combination of foot, hand, and head weaponry… Among theropods only Tyrannosaurus, with its extreme skull strength, equalled Velociraptor in total power relative to weight.”

Gregory Scott Paul (1954) U.S. researcher, author, paleontologist, and illustrator

Gregory S. Paul (1988) Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, Simon and Schuster, p. 362-363
Predatory Dinosaurs of the World

Animals

“About the only power you have is the power to discriminate. Living in a culture like this, you have to make choices and search out what has the most authentic content or substance. In the 1960s, while on LSD, I realized that my mind was a garbage receptacle of mass media images and input. I spent my whole childhood absorbing so much crap that my personality and mind are saturated with it. God only knows if that affects you physically! As a kid I became increasingly interested in earlier periods of culture. I turned into a little nostalgia boy, and I became steeped in the Our Gang fantasy from watching them on TV. So much so, that my speech patterns were affected. The style of those Our Gang comedies was so charming that I started acting and talking like Jackie Cooper and Alfalfa. They had these cute kids, artificial mannerisms. It must have been embarrassing for people to hear me talk like that.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 60

God, People, Search, Boy

“That is the wishful thinking by some interested parties. India and China are going to be the powers that will shape the 21st century. China knows it. India is conscious of it. Together, we can make a distinctive contribution toward global development and shaping of global disputes.”

S. M. Krishna (1932) Indian politician

Describing China and India, October 29, 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4001697.stm

Thinking

“As Commissar for the Armed Forces and a member of the Politburo he [Trotsky] still appeared powerful, but by 1923 he was isolated and helpless. All his former tergiversations were turned against him. When he came to realize his situation he attacked the bureaucratization of the party and the stifling of intra-party democracy: like all overthrown Communist leaders he became a democrat as soon as he was ousted from power. However, it was easy for Stalin and Zinovyev to show not only that Trotsky’ s democratic sentiments and indignation at party bureaucracy were of recent date, but that he himself, when in power, had been a more extreme autocrat than anyone else: he had supported or initiated every move to protect party "unity", had wanted – contrary to Lenin’ s policy – to place the trade unions under state control and to subject the whole economy to the coercive power of the police, and so on. In later years Trotsky claimed that the policy, which he had supported, of prohibiting "fractions" was envisaged as an exceptional measure and not a permanent principle. But there is no proof that this was so, and nothing in the policy itself suggests that it was meant to be temporary. It may be noted that Zinovyev showed more zeal than Stalin in condemning Trotsky – at one stage he was in favour of arresting him – and thus supplied Stalin with useful ammunition when the two ousted leaders tried, belatedly and hopelessly, to join forces against their triumphant rival.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 21
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown

Democracy, Support, Appearance

“One of the important functions of prayer, I believe, is to act as a stimulus to creative ideas. Within the mind are all the resources required for successful living. Ideas are present in the consciousness, which when released and given scope to grow and take shape, can lead to successful events. God, our Creator, has stored within our minds and personalities, great potential strength and ability. Prayer helps to tap and develop these powers.”

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam book Wings of Fire

Source: Wings of Fire, p. 32.

God, Idea, Success, Help

“It has been said, that the people had already surrendered all their powers to the State sovereignties, and had nothing more to give. But, surely, the question whether they may resume and modify the powers granted to government does not remain to be settled in this country. Much more might the legitimacy of the general government be doubted, had it been created by the States. The powers delegated to the State sovereignties were to be exercised by themselves, not by a distinct and independent sovereignty, created by themselves. To the formation of a league, such as was the confederation, the State sovereignties were certainly competent. But when, "in order to form a more perfect union," it was deemed necessary to change this alliance into an effective government, possessing great and sovereign powers, and acting directly on the people, the necessity of 'referring it to the people, and of deriving its powers directly from them, was felt and acknowledged by all.”

John Marshall (1755–1835) fourth Chief Justice of the United States

17 U.S. (4 Wheaton) 316, 405
McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)

People, Exercises, Question, Change

“From the invention of the cotton-gin slavery became a progressive system — not passively tolerated as in process of extinction, but actively striving for development and extension. It became a conscious political power. It made no offensive professions. It still deprecated itself as an evil, so difficult to deal with, and, with an adroit allusion to Ham and Onesimus, it smoothed the ecclesiastical conscience of the country and only asked to be let alone. And it was let alone. The War of 1812, and the consequent commercial confusion and renewed devotion to trade, held the country torpid upon the subject. If anybody looked at slavery inquisitively, it folded its hands demurely upon its breast and said, 'I am such a dreadful thing! How unfortunate that I should exist! What can be done with me? Just please to let me alone, that is all I want. A leper, you see; a miserable leper!”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

War, Evil, Country

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

Way, Science

“As power becomes great, concupiscence grows less.”

As-Saffah (722–754) First Abbasid caliph

History of the Caliphs, p. 263

“For this reason Ahuramazda bore aid, and the other gods who are, because I was not hostile, I was not a Lie-follower, I was not a doer of wrong -- neither I nor my family. According to righteousness I conducted myself. Neither to the weak nor to the powerful did I do wrong.”

Darius I of Persia (-550–-486 BC) 3rd king of the Persian Achaemenid Empire (550–486 BC)

DB inscription http://www.avesta.org/op/op.htm#db1, COLUMN 4, 63. (4.61-7.)

God, Hostility, Lie, Family

“The terrorists have won… What was their goal 15 long, sad years ago? To strip from the world's greatest power, their traditions of growing tolerance. To hamstring the international interests of a country that barely stuck to the international double-white line of the moral road, but came closer than any other. To take our energies from trying… to help the world move forward, and instead make us direct those energies inward, at one another, within our own borders.”

Keith Olbermann (1959) American sports and political commentator

"The Terrorists Have Won" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYHEmzIJwo (November 2016), The Closer, YouTube

World, Sadness, Help, Country

“She was temptable—which, if you believe in an all-powerful God, means God intentionally put temptation into Eve. Which seems like a dirty trick, if you ask me.”

John Scalzi book The Ghost Brigades

Source: The Ghost Brigades (2006), Chapter 13 (p. 288)

God

“And the harder the SSC ["safe, sane and consensual"] gets pushed at me, the harder I feel like pushing back. Passion, that's what I'm into, passion and blood and honor, so powerful that it pounds through my veins and blinds me, so terrible that I can't look away. Danger, Dementia, and Denial. I want to hear that panic, scream "No, Please!" and struggle through the haze of pain and pleasure and all that stuff that goes on between the moment we touch eyes and the moment when we both collapse and try to catch our breaths and break the silence.”

Laura Antoniou (1963) American novelist

Source: "Unsafe at Any Speed or: Safe, Sane and Consensual, My Fanny", p. 14

Pain, Pleasure, Feeling, Silence

“It's disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals… You take a conventional man of action, and he's satisfied if you obey. But not the intellectual. He doesn't want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there's soul-raping going on.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO1HqWUMxbs#t=2m23s with Eric Sevareid (1967)

Love, Men, Hate, Soul

“But you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it's not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it's four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it's gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”

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

2015-07-21
Speech in Sun City, South Carolina
Slate
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/07/31/donald_trump_this_run_on_sentence_from_a_speech_in_sun_city_south_carolina.html
2010s, 2015

Women, Men

“For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and... he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief … The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

Imagination

“Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that in-forms the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 21

Life, People, Memory

“I look for swims where I can carry a powerful message. No message, no swim. I don’t get wet now unless it’s for a reason.”

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

Website

“According to my experience, the only effective way to spread religion in India is for the King to proclaim by means of an edict to all his officials in India that he shall put trust only in those who will exert themselves to extend the reign of religion by every means in their power. The King must definitely order them to exert themselves with zeal to multiply the number of Christians in Cape Comorin [Kanyakumari] in order to attract to the faith of Jesus Christ the island of Ceylon, and to muster all the pious people, be they members of our Society [the Jesuits] or other that may seem fit for propagating religion…. If the King publishes such an edict and treats severely those who disobey it, a great number of natives will embrace the faith of Jesus Christ; otherwise no success can be expected.”

Francis Xavier (1506–1552) Navarrese Basque Roman Catholic saint and missionary

Letter dated 20th January 1548, to Fr. Simao Rodrigues. quoted from Goel, S. R. (1985). St. Francis Xavier: The man and his mission.

People, Faith, Religion, Way

“Our hope is that whosoever is in power, manages this country consistently for all the potential the country has.”

Indra Nooyi (1955) Indian-born, naturalized American, business executive

Narendra Modi question elicits 'no comment' from PepsiCo chief Indra Nooyi

Hope, Country

“So vivid is my recollection of the birth of Benjamin Black that surely, I feel, a cunning artificer has been at work, fashioning a surreally realistic picture of something that happened quite differently from what I seem to remember. Consider that light falling on the sea, how effulgent and steady it is; consider the trees, improbably full-leafed for the time of year – and look at those birds! Has Madam Memory really such a piercing eye for detail, are her powers of recall so comprehensive?”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville on the birth of his dark twin, Benjamin Black (2011)

Feeling, Fashion, Birth, Bird

“We have also watched the Federal Government grow in power and scope. Our nation was designed to foster 50 hotbeds of innovation and experimentation. Sadly, the Federal Government attempts to micromanage everything from Washington D. C. For example, the Federal Departments of Agriculture and Transportation are currently attempting to require anyone operating farm equipment on their own property to have a Commercial Driver's License (CDL). This places an undue burden on family farms. For the first 220 years of the Federal Government's existence, our farming communities have managed to operate farm equipment without the government's interference. Laws that hurt Hoosier jobs must be nullified.”

Rupert Boneham (1964) American mentor, television personality, and politician

Rupert on the Issues (2011)

Family, Law, Communication, Hurt

“One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child. The child has not yet had the chance to know what it is like to be a grownup; he believes, even, that being a grownup is a mistake he will never make—when he grows up he will keep on being a child, a big child with power. So the child and grownup live in mutual love, misunderstanding, and distaste. Children shout and play and cry and want candy; grownups say Ssh! and work and scold and want steak. There is no disputing tastes as contradictory as these. It is not just Mowgli who was raised by a couple of wolves; any child is raised by a couple of grownups. Father and Mother may be nearer and dearer than anyone will ever be again—still, they are members of a different species. God is, I suppose, what our parents were; certainly the ogre of the stories is so huge, so powerful, and so stupid because that is the way a grownup looks to a child.
Grownups forget or cannot believe that they seem even more unreasonable to children than children seem to them.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“An Unread Book’, pp. 51–52
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Love, God, Children, Stupidity

“At the same time we would most like to run the film back and see how the sanctuaries close again and the lights go out and the great powers of nature are once again met with deserved reverence. One can fell an oak in twenty seconds; but in order to become what it now is, it grew for a century.... Progress is but a word without sense, and the cow, which keeps the world alive, will not move faster than three kilometers per hour in the future, either.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1950, in: Fernand Léger - The Later Years, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 15
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1950's

World, Nature, Sense, Light

“The church in the spiritual and theological sense always contains a current that is hostile to political power, that is revolutionary and anarchical. But this is not the current that society as a whole, and especially the political authorities, recognize as the church. If these many movements have failed, it is primarily because of their intrinsic nature. Spiritual currents cannot last. When they attach political power, this power attacks them in return and proclaims that the true church is that which is in alliance with it.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 132

Hostility, Nature, Sense

“The elder Herschel, directing his wonderful tube towards the sides of our system, where stars are planted most rarely… was enabled with awe struck mind to see suspended in the vast empyrean astral systems, or, as he called them, firmaments, resembling our own. Like light cloudlets to a certain power of the telescope, they resolved themselves, under a greater power, into stars, though these generally seemed no larger than the finest particles of diamond dust. The general forms of these systems are various; but one at least has been detected as bearing a striking resemblance to the supposed form of our own. The distances are also various… The farthest observed by the astronomer were estimated by him as thirty-five thousand times more remote than Sirius, supposing its distance to be about twenty thousand millions of miles. It would thus appear, that not only does gravitation keep our earth in its place in the solar system, and the solar system in its place in our astral system, but it also may be presumed to have the mightier duty of preserving a local arrangement between that astral system and an immensity of others, through which the imagination is left to wander on and on without limit or stay, save that which is given by its inability to grasp the unbounded.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 6-7

Imagination, Star, Light, Appearance

“One just principle from the depths of a cave is more powerful than an army.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)

“Of Law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world. All things in heaven and earth do her homage,—the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power.”

Richard Hooker (1554–1600) English bishop and Anglican Divine

Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1594), Book I, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

God, World, Law, Feeling

“So there is little cause for the fear that our journalism, merely because it is prosperous, is likely to betray us. But it calls for additional effort to avoid even the appearance of the evil of selfishness. In every worthy profession, of course, there will always be a minority who will appeal to the baser instinct. There always have been, and probably always will be some who will feel that their own temporary interest may be furthered by betraying the interest of others. But these are becoming constantly a less numerous and less potential element in the community. Their influence, whatever it may seem at a particular moment, is always ephemeral. They will not long interfere with the progress of the race which is determined to go its own forward and upward way. They may at times somewhat retard and delay its progress, but in the end their opposition will be overcome. They have no permanent effect. They accomplish no permanent result. The race is not traveling in that direction. The power of the spirit always prevails over the power of the flesh. These furnish us no justification for interfering with the freedom of the press, because all freedom, though it may sometime tend toward excesses, bears within it those remedies which will finally effect a cure for its own disorders.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Press Under a Free Government (1925)

Fear, Way, Travel, Feeling

“The staff came to enquire after my needs. They were revolting in their obsequiousness.
A disgusting little part of me gobbled it up. A part just big enough to show why some men lust after power. But not for me, thank you. I am too lazy. And I am, I fear, the unfortunate victim of a sense of responsibility. Put me in charge and I try to accomplish the ends to which the office was allegedly created. I guess I suffer from an impoverishment of the sociopathic spirit necessary to go big time.”

Glen Cook book Shadow Games

Source: Shadow Games (1989), Chapter 6, “Opal” (p. 34)

Men, Fear, Sense, Suffering

“Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5

World, Thinking

“It is time to stop paving the cow paths. Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over. We should “reengineer” our businesses: use the power of modern information technology to radically redesign our business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in their performance.”

Michael Hammer (1948–2008) American academic

Source: "Reengineering work: don't automate, obliterate," 1990, p. 104

Business, Time

“What language did these Macedones speak? The name itself is Greek in root and in ethnic termination. It probably means highlanders, and it is comparable to Greek tribal names such as `Orestai' and `Oreitai', meaning 'mountain-men'. A reputedly earlier variant, `Maketai', has the same root, which means `high', as in the Greek adjective makednos or the noun mekos. The genealogy of eponymous ancestors which Hesiod recorded […] has a bearing on the question of Greek speech. First, Hesiod made Macedon a brother of Magnes; as we know from inscriptions that the Magnetes spoke the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language, we have a predisposition to suppose that the Macedones spoke the Aeolic dialect. Secondly, Hesiod made Macedon and Magnes first cousins of Hellen's three sons - Dorus, Xouthus, and Aeolus-who were the founders of three dialects of Greek speech, namely Doric, Ionic, and Aeolic. Hesiod would not have recorded this relationship, unless he had believed, probably in the seventh century, that the Macedones were a Greek speaking people. The next evidence comes from Persia. At the turn of the sixth century the Persians described the tribute-paying peoples of their province in Europe, and one of them was the `yauna takabara', which meant `Greeks wearing the hat'. There were Greeks in Greek city-states here and there in the province, but they were of various origins and not distinguished by a common hat. However, the Macedonians wore a distinctive hat, the kausia. We conclude that the Persians believed the Macedonians to be speakers of Greek. Finally, in the latter part of the fifth century a Greek historian, Hellanicus, visited Macedonia and modified Hesiod's genealogy by making Macedon not a cousin, but a son of Aeolus, thus bringing Macedon and his descendants firmly into the Aeolic branch of the Greek-speaking family. Hesiod, Persia, and Hellanicus had no motive for making a false statement about the language of the Macedonians, who were then an obscure and not a powerful people. Their independent testimonies should be accepted as conclusive.”

N. G. L. Hammond (1907–2001) British classical scholar

"The Macedonian State" p.12-13)

Men, People, Family, Mountain

“The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter II, Section I, p. 15

Error, Idea, Parting

“Never underestimate the power of human ingratitude.”

Glen Cook book Shadow Games

Source: Shadow Games (1989), Chapter 30, “Taglios Aroused” (p. 156)

“The Japanese people, since the war, have undergone the greatest reformation recorded in modern history. With a commendable will, eagerness to learn, and marked capacity to understand, they have, from the ashes left in war's wake, erected in Japan an edifice dedicated to the supremacy of individual liberty and personal dignity; and in the ensuing process there has been created a truly representative government committed to the advance of political morality, freedom of economic enterprise, and social justice. Politically, economically, and socially Japan is now abreast of many free nations of the earth and will not again fail the universal trust… I sent all four of our occupation divisions to the Korean battlefront without the slightest qualms as to the effect of the resulting power vacuum upon Japan. The results fully justified my faith. I know of no nation more serene, orderly, and industrious, nor in which higher hopes can be entertained for future constructive service in the advance of the human race.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

1950s, Farewell address to Congress (1951)

War, People, Faith, Justice

“I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. There's nobody as beautiful or as powerful as me!”

Billy Graham (wrestler) (1943–2023) American professional wrestler, american football player, bodybuilder

Billy Graham, Tangled Ropes: Superstar Billy Graham (2006)

Beauty, Bee

“Freedom is basically a spiritual longing/ That can only be filled by a spiritual power.”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu (1957) Indian philosopher

Freedom: Foster It! p. 114.
Freedom: Foster it! (2004)

Freedom

“Shortly after the British government had protested Hitler's violation of the military clauses of the Versailles Treaty on March 16 and then joined Italy and France in proclaiming their determination to uphold the sanctity of treaties, it had, behind the backs of its two Stresa allies, negotiated a naval agreement which violated the naval clauses of the Versailles Treaty and gave Hitler the right and encouragement to build all the warships his shipyards could construct for at least ten years.* The Naval Pact was signed in London on June 18, 1935, without the British government having the courtesy to consult with France and Italy, or later, to inform them of the secret agreements which stipulated that the Germans could build in certain categories more powerful warships than any the three Western nations then possessed. The French regarded this as treachery, which it was. They saw it as a further appeasement of Hitler, whose appetite grew on concessions. And they resented the British agreeing, for what they thought a private gain, to scrap further the peace treaty and thus add to the growing overall military power of Nazi Germany.”

William L. Shirer book The Collapse of the Third Republic

The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969)

Secret, Peace

“If they think their dead grandmother is visiting them at night, more power to them. They don't need me telling them (it's) true or not true. There are those few people who may challenge the facts and say some of the stuff may not be true. I say to them, "Chill out, relax and have an open mind."”

George Noory (1950) Talk Radio Host

Feburary 15, 2006, Wired News: Coast to Coast AM is No Wack Job http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70218-0.html?tw=wn_index_1

People, Thinking, Night, Dead

“Still the Constitution tells us emphatically that the power of the purse belongs to Congress. It is hoped, Mr. President, distinguished colleagues, that with these proposed amendments in the Fiscal Year 2015 budget or GAA, Congress will adhere to the ruling of the highest Court in the land and regain its Constitutionally-mandated control over the purse strings.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

Hope

“He was meaner, more irritable, more impatient for the ultimate power which could only be his through the elimination of all rivals; and if he had ever had any scruples, any love at all for even a monkey, a book, or a sword-hilt, all this, and even this, had been cauterized and drowned away.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 58 (p. 704)

Love, Books

“If I am asked what we are fighting for I reply in two sentences: In the first place, to fulfil a solemn international obligation, an obligation which, if it had been entered into between private persons in the ordinary concerns of life, would have been regarded as an obligation not only of law but of honour, which no self-respecting man could possibly have repudiated. I say, secondly, we are fighting to vindicate the principle which, in these days when force, material force, sometimes seems to be the dominant influence and factor in the development of mankind, we are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power. I do not believe any nation ever entered into a great controversy – and this is one of the greatest history will ever know – with a clearer conscience and a stronger conviction that it is fighting, not for aggression, not for the maintenance even of its own selfish interest, but that it is fighting in defence of principles the maintenance of which is vital to the civilisation of the world.”

H. H. Asquith (1852–1928) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Address to the House of Commons on the declaration of war with Germany; see [Asquith, 6 August 1914, http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/asquithspeechtoparliament.htm, British Prime Minister's Address to Parliament]

Life, World, Faith, Law

“The interlacedness of the two heterogeneous origins [Remark: This refers to the origins of governance: (1) necessity to work cooperatively, (2) the fight between man and man] prevails as the fundamental characteristic of governance. Therefore even any true community, being successful somewhere between boundaries for a common purpose, elsewhere becomes in theory a means for misleading, used to interpret and cover-up actually existing power. Again and again things are named by their contrary and are hidden. In that manner, under the pretense of communication - the open discussion - people are interrogated and commands are given, under the pretense of freedom and voluntariness behavior is enforced, in the coat of pure ethics the evil is carried out, under the pretense of truth lies and fraud are committed, and all values valid at any one time are, depending on the situation, either applied or ignored. [Remarks: "Herrschaft" = "governance" or "leadership", "Gewalt" = "power" or "violence"]”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

On Truth (1948), Pt 2, Ch. 3, II, B, 3, b)

People, Truth, Behavior, Communication

“Is it true that the North hates slavery? My next proposition is that in the past the North has invariably exerted against slavery, all the power which it had at the time. The question merely was what was the amount of power it had to exert against it. They abolished slavery in that magnificent empire which you presented to the North; they abolished slavery in every Northern State, one after another; they abolished slavery in all the territory above the line of 36 30, which comprised about one million square miles. They have endeavored to put the Wilmot Proviso upon all the other territories of the Union, and they succeeded in putting it upon the territories of Oregon and Washington. They have taken from slavery all the conquests of the Mexican war, and appropriated it all to anti-slavery purposes; and if one of our fugitives escapes into the territories, they do all they can to make a free man of him; they maltreat his pursuers, and sometimes murder them. They make raids into your territory with a view to raise insurrection, with a view to destroy and murder indiscriminately all classes, ages and sexes, and when the base perpetrators are caught and brought to punishment, condign punishment, half the north go into mourning. If some of the perpetrators escape, they are shielded by the authorities of these Northern States-not by an irresponsible mob, but, by the regularly organized authorities of the States.”

Henry L. Benning (1814–1875) Confederate Army general

Speech to the Virginia Convention (1861)

Hate, War, Age, Sex

“Montanans are fed up with politicians who say one thing back home but vote another way in Washington, D. C., the people of Montana deserve a senator who will defend our way of life, get the federal government out of the way, and return power to the hardworking people who make this country great.”

Matt Rosendale (1960) Member of the Montana House of Representatives

Matt Rosendale Announces U.S. Senate Run https://www.mattformontana.com/posts/press/matt-rosendale-announces-us-senate-run (July 31, 2017)

Life, People, Way, Home

“"Power is always a relative concept."—the illithid Yharaskrik”

R. A. Salvatore book Servant of the Shard

Servant of the Shard

“For Rawls simultaneously appeals to the natural outlook of a democratic society to found his conception of the person, and to his conception of the person to found the basic structure of a democratic society. The warrant of the doctrine of two moral powers is that it ‘suits’ a society in which justice is conceived as fairness; and the warrant of justice as fairness, with its schedule of fundamental principles and primary goods, is that it ‘protects’ the exercise of the two moral powers. The attenuated idea of a person is the theoretical plinth of a desirable constitution, determining what count as primary goods ‘in advance’ of any further requirements of social life – yet is also no more than an ideological reflex of the culture it is supposed to generate. In a vicious circle, public arrangements are deduced from personal capacities defined as adapted to public arrangements.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 4. "Designing Consensus, John Rawls" (1994), p. 108

Life, Justice, Exercises, Idea

“Well, God is in His heaven
And we all want what's his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I'm gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991 (1991), Blind Willie McTell (recorded 1983)

God, Singing

“A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Preface.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Time

“The essence of love is getting out of oneself and into others. When we care less about our feelings, our rights, our happiness, our security, etc., and begin to concern ourselves with the feelings, rights, happiness, and security of others, we will have found the true power of love.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

A Magazine of People and Possibilities interview (1998)

Love, Happiness, Feeling

“I must say that the Pagan movement will have a lot to do. The opposing forces are very powerful, and they have a long tradition of using force and repression. But I believe that a new spirit is rising and once the Pagans begin to speak, they are going to be heard.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Of Hindus, Pagans and The Return of The Gods Hinuism Today https://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=868

“It is intolerable that it should be in the power of one blockhead to do so much mischief.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Fox on George III in a letter to Mr. Fitzpatrick (9 September 1781), quoted in John Brooke, George III (Panther, 1974), pp. 363-364.
1780s

“We favor hypotheses for their simplicity and explanatory power, much as the architect of the world might have done in choosing which possibility to create.”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Source: The Emergence Of Probability, 1975, Chapter 15, Inductive Logic, p. 142.

World

“When a woman responds to mistreatment by protesting "I'm a human being!" or "I want to be treated with respect, not like some animal," what is she suggesting about the acceptable ways of treating other animals? Perhaps because comparisons between women and nonhuman animals so often entail sexism, many women are anxious to distance themselves from other animals. Feminists, especially, recognize that negative "animal" imagery has advanced women's oppression. However, if our treatment and view of other animals became caring, respectful, and just, nonhuman-animal metaphors would quickly lose all power to demean. Few women have confronted how closely they mirror patriarchal oppressors when they too participate in other species' denigration. Women who avoid acknowledging that they are animals closely resemble men who prefer to ignore that women are human.”

Joan Dunayer American activist

" Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots https://books.google.it/books?id=iJSuTkFlpyIC&pg=PA11", in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, edited by Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 19.

Women, Men, Way, Animals

“If we taught men to repress feelings and rewarded him instead for being a captain he might be willing to die to protect us; if we paid him enough to feed his family if he worked in a coal mine, he might be willing to die sooner to keep us warm. But all that required him to forfeit his feelings – his power as a human being – and substitute it for “power” as a human doing: feeling obligated to earn money someone else spent while he died sooner.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Men, Money, Family, Feeling

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do…”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 4 (The Master Summoner)

Truth, Way, Boy, Knowledge

“There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

"On the Sufferings of the World"
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Studies in Pessimism

World, Time, Success

“I have been among the officers who have said that a large land war in Asia is the last thing we should undertake. Most of us, when we use that term, are thinking about getting into a land war against Red China. That's the only power in Asia which would require us to use forces in very large numbers. I was slow in joining with those who recommended the introduction of ground forces in South Vietnam. But it became perfectly clear that because of the rate of infiltration from North Vietnam to South Vietnam something had to be done.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Quote from an interview, "Top Authority Looks at Vietnam War and Its Future", U.S. News & World Report (February 21, 1966), p. 42.

War, Thinking

“What followed, during many generations, was the cruel domination of class over class, the oppression of the poor by the rich, and of the ignorant by the wise. The spirit of that domination found passionate utterance in the verses of the aristocratic poet Theognis,… who longed to drink the blood of his political adversaries. From these oppressors the people of many cities sought deliverance in the less intolerable tyranny of revolutionary usurpers. The remedy gave new shape and energy to the evil. …rights secured by equal laws and by sharing power existed nowhere.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

People, Law, Drink, Passion

“Processions of priests and religiosi have been for several days past praying for rain; but the gods are either angry, or nature is too powerful.”

Tim Powers book The Stress of Her Regard

Source: The Stress of Her Regard (1989), Chapter 17 (p. 285; quoting from the journal of Edward Williams)

God, Nature, Past

“Had we seen an earthquake, or the results of a powerful storm, the devastation and loss would have been awful — but our country has seen terrible tragedies before: fires, earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. We prayed for the lost, rebuilt for the survivors, and strengthened our laws, dikes, weather warnings and earthquake predictors. We prepare for an eventual recurrence of acts of nature…
But 9-11 was not a natural catastrophe: these events were deliberate, conceived, organized and ruthlessly executed by human beings. And so, their significance must be assessed differently — and the actions to prepare for “next time” must be different, also.”

Wesley Clark (1944) American general and former Democratic Party presidential candidate

Seton Hall Address (2002)

Law, Nature, Loss, Time

“BE IT KNOWN unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, unto whom this work shall come: That we, through the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, their brethren, and also of the people of Jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken. And we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a surety that the work is true. And we also testify that we have seen the engravings which are upon the plates; and they have been shown unto us by the power of God, and not of man. And we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true. And it is marvelous in our eyes. Nevertheless, the voice of the Lord commanded us that we should bear record of it; wherefore, to be obedient unto the commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things. And we know that if we are faithful in Christ, we shall rid our garments of the blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment-seat of Christ, and shall dwell with him eternally in the heavens. And the honor be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which is one God. Amen. OLIVER COWDERY DAVID WHITMER MARTIN HARRIS”

Oliver Cowdery (1806–1850) American Mormon leader

Book of Mormon, 1830 Edition, p. 585 (1830).

Men, God, People, Faith

“Human beings, having, above all creatures, received the power of reason… need to be aware where nature is unaware. Nature reaches its culmination in humans, but human consciousness has not its essence in itself or nature.”

Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist

As quoted in Carl Reinhold Bråkenhielm (2009), "Linnaeus and homo religiosus," Universitet, p. 83.

Nature

“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

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

Tweet by @realDonaldTrump https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948355557022420992 (2 January 2018) <br class="br">2010s, 2018, January

Food, Time

“Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey. Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin…”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Introduction: Foundations of Revolt
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922)

Happiness, People, Nature, Knowledge

“…with the true convert, holiness is woven into all his powers, principles, and practice.”

Joseph Alleine (1634–1668) Pastor, author

Source: An Alarm to the Unconverted aka A Sure Guide to Heaven (first published 1671), P. 30.

“Through a wise and salutary neglect [of the colonies], a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Works of Edmund Burke Volume ii, p. 117
Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

Wisdom, Way, Feeling, Nature

“There is something radically wrong, [the anarchist] declares, in a system of society that functions and maintains its existence by the impetus of violence and force. He sees nothing praiseworthy in political society which has recourse to periodic wars, or need of jails, gallows and bludgeons--and it is because he is aware that these brutal weapons are the instruments of every government and State that he works for their destruction. … Unlike the politician, he does not regard dishonesty, brutality and avariciousness as natural characteristics of human nature, but as the inevitable consequences of coercion and frustration engendered by artificial law, he believes that these social evils are best eradicated not by greater penalties and further legislation, but by the free development of the latent forces of solidarity and sympathetic understanding which government and law so ruthlessly suppress. … Freedom will be possible when people understand and desire it--for man can only rule where others subserviently obey. Where none obey, none has power to rule.”

George Nicholson (1760–1825) British anarchist and author

"The simplicity of anarchism" in Freedom, 1955. Reprinted in What Is Anarchism?: An Introduction by Donald Rooum, ed. (London: Freedom Press, 1992, 1995) pp. 39-40.

War, People, Law, Penalty

“To the Carpenter, with his splendid worldliness, the premier qualification for character was self-respect, and the alertness and mastery of environment which go with self-respect. But to Paul the primate virtue is submissiveness—"the powers that be!" He sought to cure the seditiousness of the working class by drawing off their gaze to a crown of righteousness reserved in heaven for them—a gaseous felicity beyond the stars.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), p. 237

Star, Drawing

“Protocols:
Number 1, paras. 9,10
If every State has two foes, and if in regard to the external foe it is allowed and not considered immoral to use every manner and art of conflict, as for example to keep the enemy in ignorance of plans of attack and defense, to attack him by night or in superior numbers, then in what way can the same means in regard to a worse foe, the destroyer of the structure of society and the commonweal, be called immoral and not permissible?
Is it possible for any sound logical mind to hope with any success to guide crowds by the aid of reasonable counsels and arguments,, when any objection or contradiction, senseless though it may be, can be made and when such objection may find more favor with the people, whose powers of reasoning are superficial?
Graves: The basic ideas are the same despite word changes like… “two kinds of enemies” versus, “two foes.””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.74

People, Hope, Art, Way

Quotes about power page 71

Quotes about power
page 71