POWER QUOTES VI

quotations about power

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

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But whatever gives power is also potentially dangerous. What can make others anxious is a potentially destructive power; and if it can harm others it might also destroy its owner.

BRUNO BETTELHEIM

Symbolic Wounds

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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

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If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.

TOM STOPPARD

Squaring the Circle

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Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never.

VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE

"The Economic Tendency of Freethought"


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

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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

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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


The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven

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Beware of the man who rises to power
From one suspender.

EDGAR LEE MASTERS

"John Hancock Otis", Spoon River Anthology


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

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Now there is a source of future weakness in the idea of power assumed only for a term limited and defined. A Parliament near its end becomes helpless and unable to act. When the period fixed, or supposed to be fixed, is approaching, power will slip away. Disappointed people, men impatient of having to wait, hungry, jealous, reluctant supporters, will gravitate in other directions, will promote rivalry, will speed the parting chief, will magnify the rising sun.

LORD ACTON

letter to Mary Gladstone, June 9, 1880

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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

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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

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Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Queen Mab

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Power deludes the ones who wield it.

BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON

Dune: House Harkonnen

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He who has great desire should have great power; if not, woe be to him.

WILLIAM OF POITIERS

attributed, Day's Collacon


Power gradually extirpates for the mind every humane and gentle virtue.

EDMUND BURKE

A Vindication of Natural Society

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We never get far from wealth and all of its masks when we deal with power.

FRANK HERBERT

Children of Dune

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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

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