Power Quotes

There is no place so dangerous as a world without magic.

~ Terry Goodkind

Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava).

~ Georges Bataille

She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people said, Convince me, she knew it didn’t mean they had an open mind. It meant they had power and wanted to enjoy it a minute.

~ Max Barry

THAT'S WHAT POWERFUL MEN DO TO THIS COUNTRY - IT'S A BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, BREATHLESS COUNTRY, AND POWERFUL MEN USE IT TO TREAT THEMSELVES TO A THRILL! THEY SAY THEY LOVE IT BUT THEY DON'T MEAN IT. THEY SAY THINGS TO MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR GOOD - THEY MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR MORAL...THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOUR. THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY'RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US.

~ John Irving

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

~ Christopher Hitchens

What if one out of every three multinational corporation CEO's were raped every year? Don't you think that would raise a kind of ruckus?

~ Inga Muscio

There is a special place in hell for women that will not help one another.

~ Rae Mariz

He would be able to create a scent that was not merely human, but super human, an angels scent, so indescribably good and vital that who ever smelt it would be enchanted and with his whole heart would have to love him.

~ Patrick Süskind

The decide word is so powerful. It's amazing what you can do once you decide to do it.

~ Lorii Myers

Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.

~ Leo Tolstoy

And so I was scared. I was scared of my own sexual hunger, which felt so secretive and uncharted, and I was scared of the sexual hunger of boys, which felt so vivid and overt, and I was terribly uncertain of the relationships between sex and power and value, which seemed so merged and hard to tease apart. In the midst of all that, I didn't exactly loathe my body, or feel ashamed of it, but I was deeply ashamed of my fear, which felt disabling and immature and woefully, painfully uncool, a terrible secret, evidence of some profound failing and ignorance on my part. Other girls, or so I imagined, knew what to do, how to use their power, how to derive pleasure from it, and in contrast, I felt not only freakish but isolated, as though I was standing outside a vital, defining loop.

~ Caroline Knapp

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.

~ Frank Herbert

Kelsier smiled. 'It means that you, Vin, are a very special person. You have a power that most high noblemen envy. It is a power that, had you been born an aristocrat, would have made you one of the most deadly and influential people in all of the final empire.'Kelsier leaned forward again. 'But, you weren't born an aristocrat. You're not noble, Vin. You don't have to play by their rules--and that makes you even more powerful.

~ Brandon Sanderson

Great empires are not maintained by timidity.

~ Tacitus

If power is the only important thing, then Frodo loses against Sauron. Hell, if power’s the only important thing then Gandalf loses against Sauron. If magic is the deciding factor of a fight, then four plucky kids from England get their asses turned to stone by the White Which.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

In this world, who can do a thing, will not;And who would do it, cannot, I perceive:Yet the will's somewhat — somewhat, too, the power —And thus we half-men struggle.

~ Robert Browning

Give a truly good person power, and they’re still a good person. Give a bad person power, and they’re still a bad person. The question is always about the person in between. The one that isn’t evil, or good, but just ordinary. You don’t always know what an ordinary person is like on the inside.

~ Laurell K. Hamilton

And what exactly do you think this proves? he spits. You've got power, but you don't know what to do wit

~ Patrick Ness

The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It's a kind of power, isn't it, knowing a secret? But lately I don't like it so much, knowing this. It's not really mine to know, is it?

~ Kim Edwards

My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore. He’d watch a plane gaining altitude after taking off from Sky Harbor and he’d sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people. He was sensitive to the most incidental stimulus and he thought he could feel the object itself yearning to burst. All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. His sister used to tell him, Go ahead, blow it up, let me see you take that plane out of the sky with all two hundred people aboard, and it scared him to hear someone talk this way and it scared her too because she wasn’t completely convinced he could not do it. It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent. But Jeff got older and lost interest and conviction. He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things.

~ Don Delillo

Calmness is the cradle of power.

~ J.g. Holland

To be able to shit on people before they get a chance to shit on you. That's power.

~ Sister Souljah

Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles, but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power, they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite.

~ Michel Foucault

When you have no real power, go public -- really public. The public is where the real power is.

~ Elizabeth Warren

I hate what you represent.... Power without conviction. Isana replied, her tone lifeless, matter of fact. Ambition without conscience. Decent folk suffer at the hands of those like you.

~ Jim Butcher

The pow'r I have on you is to spare you / The malice towards you, to forgive you. Posthumus

~ William Shakespeare

The 'will to power and independence' has become so ubiquitous that it is now considered normal.

~ William Paul Young

I recreate myself, that is my only power.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.

~ John Le Carré

Power in the hands of the reformer is no less potentially corrupting than in the hands of the oppressor.

~ Derrick A. Bell

Do I look like I want to be eaten alive after sex?

~ Nalini Singh

All empires fall, eventually.” “But why? It’s not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires.[”]

~ Max Barry

If you never have sex you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from adults. It's by having sex that adolescents first rebel.And if you never have sex, you never grow beyond everything else your parents taught you. If you never break the rule against sex, you won't break any other rule.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state.

~ Noah Webster

The older a wizard grows, the more silent he becomes, like a woody vine growing over time to choke a garden path, deep and full of moss and snakes, running everywhere, impenetrable.

~ F.t. Mckinstry

To hold power has always meant to manipulate idiots and circumstances; and those circumstances and those idiots, tossed together, bring about those coincidences to which even the greatest men confess they owe most of their fame

~ Alfred De Vigny

Magic is dangerous: it's neither good nor bad, right nor wrong; it can be both a blessing and a curse. It takes strength, the strength of a man, to make the magic his own, to make it serve him, and not the other way around.

~ Daniel Wallace

I keep what I know about Sarah Lynn and Lawrence to myself. I also remind myself that even if Sarah Lynn does have a scary strict father, that doesn't release her from the responsibility of treating others with respect. Abuse of power is wrong, no matter the context, no matter the history.What is power anyway? Power is an ego trip. Power is a way to rise yourself up by lowering others, and I want nothing of it.

~ Lauren Myracle

Apathy's just a front. People offer it when there's something stronger hiding underneath. You have to work harder to tap into it, but then your performance has even more power.

~ Guy Mankowski

To find out who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

~ Kevin Alfred Strom