Power Quotes

Strong feelings do not necessarily make a strong character. The strength of a man is to be measured by the power of the feelings he subdues not by the power of those which subdue him.

William Carleton

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

Henry Kissinge

Enthusiasm... the sustaining power of all great action.

Samuel Smiles

When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timourous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence a.

Samuel Johnson

The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.

Edmund White

Whoever has the greatest command of the language, holds the power.

Susan Johnson

We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.

Charles Horton Cooley

Beware of dissipating your powers strive constantly to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but is sure to repent of every ill - Judged outlay.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Power intoxicates men. When a man is intoxicated by alcohol, he can recover, but when intoxicated by power, he seldom recovers.

James F. Byrnes

What this power is, I cannot say. All I know is that it exists... and it becomes available only when you are in that state of mind in which you know EXACTLY what you want... and are fully determined not to quit until you get it.

Alexander Graham Bell

Knowledge is power.

Sir Francis Bacon, Religious Meditations, Of Heresies, 1597

All we actually have is our body and its muscles that allow us to be under our own power.

Allegra Kent, Once a Dancer?

Every good communist should know that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Mao Tse Tung

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest of human creature that walks.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Most powerful is he who has himself in his power.

Seneca

Because a thing is difficult for you, do not therefore suppose it to be beyond mortal power. On the contrary, if anything is possible and proper for man to do, assume that it must fall within your own capacity.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations? Book Six

Men who accomplish great things in the industrial world are the ones who have faith in the money producing power of ideas.

Charles Fillmore

The most powerful factors in the world are clear ideas in the minds of energetic men of good will.

J. Arthur Thomson

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty - - Power is ever stealing from the many to the few.

Wendell Phillips

I believe in one thing only, the power of the human will.

Joseph Stalin

Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

Niccolo Machiavelli

It is destruction to the weak man to attempt to imitate the powerful.

Phaedrus

A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.

Primo Levi

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

Leo Buscaglia

Think what you do when you run into debt; you give another power over your liberty.

Benjamin Franklin

Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.

Abigail Adams

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralise every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good - will, complacency thoughtlessness, and optimism.

James Harvey Robinson

When you take charge of your life, there is no longer need to ask permission of other people or society at large. When you ask permission, you give someone veto power over your life.

Geoffrey F. Abert

Refrain from doing ill for one all powerful reason, lest our children should copy our misdeeds we are all to prone to imitate whatever is base and depraved.

Juvenal

Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from birth what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government to do good.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

Marcus Aelius Aurelius

There are two ways of resisting war: the legal way and the revolutionary way. The legal way involves the offer of alternatinve service not as a privilege for a few but as a right for all. The revolutionary view involves an uncompromising resistance, with a view to breaking the power of militarism in time of peace or the resources of the state in time of war.

Albert Einstein

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

Robert Frost

Knowledge is power. Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est.

Sir Francis Bacon, Meditationes Sacr?. De H? resibus. (1597)

You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark.

Giovanni Boccaccio, Leitch, Vincent B. ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001.

Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute, but they all worship money.

Mark Twain