quotations about power
Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.
EURIPIDES
The Bacchæ
Power -- the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations -- was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.... Was this phenomenon ... the reason why such men, who were truly concerned with the workings of power, chose to stay away from its center, so that they might never lose sight of power's contours?
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Neverÿon
Power is ever stealing from the many to the few; the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day, or it is rotten.
WENDELL PHILLIPS
Lectures and Speeches
To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it: the pains of power are real, its pleasures imaginary.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The worst thing that can be said of the most powerful, is that they can take your life; but the same thing can be said of the most weak.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
The History of Sexuality
The natural destiny of power is fragmentation.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.
ABIGAIL ADAMS
letter to John Adams, May 7, 1776
Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
What Desires Are Politically Important?
People at the top do not want to share their power. They've always got some marvellous reason: I'm following my religion; I'm following the laws of economics. Even Stalin: I'm representing the vanguard of the working class, so please don't cause trouble. That is the battle that every generation has, and yet we mustn't be pessimistic about it.
TONY BENN
interview, "Hope is the Key", Share International, January 2003
The supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous character.
JAMES FRAZER
The Golden Bough
Beware of the man who rises to power
From one suspender.
EDGAR LEE MASTERS
"John Hancock Otis", Spoon River Anthology
Him I would call the powerful one who controls the storms of his mind.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
"Diogenes and Plato", Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans
He who has great desire should have great power; if not, woe be to him.
WILLIAM OF POITIERS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Queen Mab
Power seems to confer on its possessor a mantle of superiority, specialness, and sexual potency, which the envious person desperately wants because he feels himself on some level to be inferior, unimportant, and impotent.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Narcissism: Denial of the True Self
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
attributed, The Dance of Life
God made every man to have power to be mightier than the events round about him; to hold by his firm will the reigns by which all things are guided.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit