Power Quotes

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

~ Christopher Hitchens

To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didn't want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses' environmental practices.

~ Jared Diamond

I’m not attached to anything.I’m attached to what it feels it's my duty, to do my duty.I think that I will die with the boots on.

~ Fidel Castro

Watching my father plan and strategize for the resistance has taught me about trust.” She leaned forward. “Personal trust is very different from political trust, my lady. The first thrives on faith. The second requires proof, whether it be upfront or covert.” Awkwardly, she patted my hand. “His Majesty has always been a powerful man. Perhaps he has never had to distinguish between the two.

~ Alison Goodman

Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?

~ David Mitchell

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

~ Frederick Douglass

Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society.

~ Robert Mckee

Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wielded for its own traditional sake.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Intelligence is power, it is the flame behind the spark of intrigue

~ Tobsha Learner

Observe this fact: in the history of mankind, every ruler who has lacked personal greatness has been forced to compensate for the deficiency by setting up the executioner at his right hand like a guardian angel

~ Alfred De Vigny

You can call anyone you want a traitor as long as you're the one holding the pen.

~ Nihad Sirees

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

~ Clive James

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.

~ Tariq Ali

At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can't take anything, you won't get anything, and if you can't hold anything, you won't keep anything. And you can't take anything without organization.

~ A. Philip Randolph

Humans elect leaders on the basis of the promises they make. We [vampires] try to elect ours based solely on the strength of their character.

~ Darren Shan

he'd never believed that power, in any shape or form, was anything more than the intemperate protrusion on the egomaniacal heart. Since all egomaniacs were insecure to their frightened cores, they this weilded power barbarically so the world would not find them out

~ Dennis Lehane

The council is a place where everyone schemes against everyone else, and people talk incessantly about Power with a capital Pow.

~ James Alan Gardner

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as the most flagrant of all passions.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Wolves regularly attacked their rivals in power, so the idea of killing to gain position was neither alien nor repulsive to her. The use of assassins she had filed as yet another of the curious tools - like swords and bows — that humans created to make up for their lack of personal armament. What she still had to puzzle through was the subtle strategies involved in killing those who were expected to inherit power rather than those who held the power itself.

~ Jane Lindskold

Not one little fellow need fear that he will be forbidden to pluck his shining grape from the cluster of political Power, that fruit reputed to be so full of wealth and glory. Can’t every gang become a club? and every club an assembly? an assembly, a convention? a convention, a senate? and isn’t a senate meant to rule? And what senate ever ruled without a man to rule it? And what did it all require? – Daring! – Aha! Well said! – What! is that all it takes? – Yes, all! The ones who have arrived say so. – Then courage, numskulls, give tongue and run for it! – That’s how it’s done

~ Alfred De Vigny

The greatest thieves are not caught. Not because it’s not known that they are thieves but because you cannot accuse them of robbery and live. These thieves are praised as national heroes and liberators or as successful entrepreneurs.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Even the purest of souls get ravished and consumed by the most thirsty quintessential desire to possess power.

~ Sirio Berati

When we use power and group identity, we hold ourselves separate from other groups of people, and demonstrate our beliefs that some of use are more deserving than others, and there are not enough good things to go around. This blinkers us, There are a myriad of other ways humans can interact to meet the needs of us all.

~ Yasmin Davar

The modern absolutism, which we find the most natural thing in the world, would have been quite beyond the dreams of the most absolute of kings.

~ Bertrand De Jouvenel

Rejoicing in his absolute authority, the single egoist will exploit it methodically, whereas a mêlée of egoists will bring about a ruinous disorder and a disastrous cleavage, because the contrariety of the appetites to be satisfied will prevent the satisfaction of any single one. Clearly, then, the effect of the pursuit of private ends under cover of the public good will be worse if there are many with a hand in power than if there is only one.

~ Bertrand De Jouvenel

Failing to indict a criminal sitting president sends the message that those in power are above the law.

~ Dashanne Stokes

The struggle for power conducted along logical lines is much more likely to occur in smoke-filled rooms than at the polls. The party system is a grid, a filter, a meat chopper, through which issues are processed for the consuming public. The Civil War confirmed our preference for this arrangement. We like the fog of politics, with the occasional drama of the flash of a lightning bolt that, happily, is usually nothing more than a near miss.

~ Robert Penn Warren

True power lies not in the spotlight, but in the influential shadows.

~ J.adam Snyder

To hold power in this world is to know things that others do not want to know.

~ Michael Davidow

Our minds become slaves to those we see as having total power to control us and to cause pain to us. We are quick to give up control of ourselves to those who have the power to rule us as long as they also have the power to feed us. This is the fundamental construct of a feudal society.

~ Majid Kazmi

There are no moral obligations in the game of empire.

~ A.h. Septimius

Power is a beautiful thing.

~ A.h. Septimius

Lying bed, I listened to them, and I wonder now where in truth the real power rested that night: whether in the hands of men like Grimston, men like Edwards. Whether it slept with the King at Oxford in an ordinary bed, dormant, like a taint in the blood. Whether it rested on the waiting benches of the Commons, or whether it went home with their plain occupants, like a shilling in each of their pockets.I think the truth is that, rather than resting in any one of several places, all real power had gone loose by that night through the realm; and the land might have belonged to any man. Any man with the will to say, 'This is what we shall do.

~ Beth Underdown

You are looking at this wrong. You think I hold my territory by the might of my fist. But that's not it. I hold my territory by consent of the governed. I think it is a very American concept, which might be why you never looked for it. — Adam Hauptman, Columbia Basin Pack Alpha, to Iacopo (Jacob) Bonarata, Lord of the Night (master vampire of Milan)

~ Patricia Briggs

Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want absolute power.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Do not wait for a coronation, the greatest emperors crown themselves.

~ Robert Greene

I find comfort in the fact that the longer I'm in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.

~ Barack Obama

Power is the ability to direct or privent the current or future actions of other groups and individuals.

~ Moisés Naím

Power does not corrupt, it merely elevates the degree in which something is done that has already been pursued.

~ Felix O. Hartmann

Power is like a house of cards. Leave it alone and it will stand forever. But if you try to build it higher and higher, sooner or later it is bound to collapse.

~ Felix O. Hartmann