quotations about power
Power never takes a back step -- only in the face of more power.
MALCOLM X
Malcolm X Speaks
So long as there is an uneasy class, a class which has not its just power, it will rashly clutch and blindly believe the notion that all men should have the same power.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
Power changes everything till it is difficult to say who are the heroes and who the villains.
LIBBA BRAY
The Sweet Far Thing
Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A Wizard of Earthsea
I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Waiting for the Barbarians
Power is superior to mere literature.
GREGORY I
attributed, Day's Collacon
The love of power is the demon of all men.
TONGAYI CHIRISA
"The Sin Eater", Sleepy Hollow
When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick. He overreaches himself, the work denies itself to him, the incarnation of the spirit no longer takes place, and to avoid the threat of senselessness he snatches after empty power. This sickness casts the genius on to the same level as those hysterical figures who, being by nature without power, slave for power, in order that they may enjoy the illusion that they are inwardly powerful, and who in this striving for power cannot let a pause intervene, since a pause would bring with it the possibility of self-reflection and self-reflection would bring collapse.
MARTIN BUBER
Between Man and Man
If any man is rich and powerful, he comes under that law of God by which the higher branches must take the burnings of the sun, and shade those that are lower; by which the tall trees must protect the weak plants beneath them.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
RALPH ELLISON
Invisible Man
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
HENRY KISSINGER
And I Quote
Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality ... and fall.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune Messiah
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
PAULO FREIRE
The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation
With great power there must also come ... great responsibility!
STAN LEE
Amazing Fantasy #15, August 1962
The spell of power never quite releases its hold.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Second Foundation
When your power comes from others, on approval, you are their slave.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Old School
The depositary of power is always unpopular.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Coningsby
One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
By power ... I do not understand a general system of domination exercised by one element or one group over another, whose effects ... traverse the entire body social ... It seems to me that first what needs to be understood is the multiplicity of relations of force that are immanent to the domain wherein they are exercised, and that are constitutive of its organization; the game that through incessant struggle and confrontation transforms them, reinforces them, inverts them; the supports these relations of force find in each other, so as to form a chain or system, or, on the other hand, the gaps, the contradictions that isolate them from each other; in the end, the strategies in which they take effect, and whose general pattern or institutional crystallization is embodied in the mechanisms of the state, in the formulation of the law, in social hegemonies. The condition of possibility of power ... should not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique space of sovereignty whence would radiate derivative and descendent forms; it is the moving base of relations of force that incessantly induce, by their inequality, states of power, but always local and unstable. Omnipresence of power: not at all because it regroups everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced at every instant, at every point, or moreover in every relation between one point and another. Power is everywhere: not that it engulfs everything, but that it comes from everywhere.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
History of Sexuality