Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Kissinger suggests that power is highly attractive to many people.
In plain terms
People are very attracted to power.
What can you take from it?
Power attracts people strongly.

Where it applies

  • political ambition
  • corporate strategy
  • social dynamics

Putting it to work

  • influence building
  • negotiation
  • career strategy

Questions to consider

  • What attracts you most in life?
  • Is power inherently good or bad?

Another view

This ignores people who seek power for public service rather than attraction.

More from Henry Kissinger

  1. Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.

    Permalink to quote #3
  2. In the 1950s and 1960s we put several thousand nuclear weapons into Europe. To be sure, we had no percise idea of what to do with them.

    Permalink to quote #5
  3. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not…

    Permalink to quote #2

Related quotes

  1. The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.

    Reinhold NiebuhrReinhold Niebuhr quote #8
  2. Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. …

    Edmund BurkeEdmund Burke quote #22
  3. Love is potent stuff, isn't it?

    Joseph HellerJoseph Heller quote #38