Power Quotes

Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer. Be what you say; and, within the rules of prudence, say what you are.

Alford

A student is not a professional athlete. ... He is not a little politician or junior senator looking for angles... an amateur promoter, a glad - Hander, embryo Rotarian, caf - Society leader, quiz kid or man about town. A student is a person who is learning to fulfill his powers and to find ways of using them in the service of mankind.

Harold Taylo

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.

Rene Descartes

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.

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

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.

Lord Acton

When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.

Emile Coue

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

Epictetus

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

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Honore de Balzac

Being perfectly well - Dressed gives a feeling of tranquility that religion is powerless to bestow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoting a friend

The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish Government, presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established Government.

George Washington

Of all the gods, Death only craves not gifts: Nor sacrifice, nor yet drink - Offering poured Avails; no altars hath he, nor is soothed By hymns of praise. From him alone of all The powers of heaven Persuasion holds aloof.

Aeschylus (525 - 456 B. C.), Frag. 146 (trans. by Plumptre).

Numbers are essential, but not absolutely essential to strength. For many churches are numerically strong but lamentably weak spiritually. Numbers, then, are no display of spiritual power or strength.

W. T. Ussery

Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.

Stephen Covey

The two important things I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of an endeavor is taking the first step, making the first decision.

Robyn Davidson

All power in human hands is liable to be abused.

Sarah Bernhardt

What a mistake to suppose that the passions are strongest in youth The passions are not stronger, but the control over them is weaker They are more easily excited, they are more violent and apparent but they have less energy, less durability, less intense and concentrated power than in the maturer life.

Edward Bulwer - Lytton

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

John Ernst Steinbeck

A cult is a religion with no political power.

Tom Wolfe

What power has love but forgiveness In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise.

William Carlos Williams

I have found power in the mysteries of thought, exaltation in the changing of the Muses I have been versed in the reasonings of men but Fate is stronger than anything I have known.

Euripides

The body is a marvelous machine... a chemical laboratory, a power - House. Every movement, voluntary or involuntary, full of secrets and marvels!

Theodor Herzl

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for. success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.

Vaclav Havel

Lack of will power has caused more failure than lack of intelligence or ability.

Flower A. Newhouse

Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.

Mahatma Gandhi

So they the Government go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all - Powerful to be impotent.

Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 12, 1936

Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of al evil, the sum of all blessings.

Carl Sandburg

Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

Remember that the evil which is now in the world will only get more powerful, and that it is not evil which conquers evil, but only love.

The Grand Duchess Olga of Russia, Letter, 1917

O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us. O would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us.

Robert Burns, Poem "To a Louse" - Verse 8

The most extensive computation known has been conducted over the last billion years on a planet - wide scale: it is the evolution of life. The power of this computation is illustrated by the complexity and beauty of its crowning achievement, the human brain.

David Rogers, Weather Prediction Using a Genetic Memory

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you speak.

Toni Morrison, American writer (1931 -)

I want to know not his earning power but his yearning power.

David McCord

Time crumbles things everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.

Aristotle

I want to talk to these people because they stay in power and you change all the time.

Nikita Khrushchev

Knowledge is power.

Sir Francis Bacon, Religious Meditations, Of Heresies, 1597

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

Albert Einstein