2,571 Power Quotes

Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.

The whole Constitution has been erected upon the assumption that the King not only is capable of doing wrong but is more likely to do wrong than other men if he is given the chance.

The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. 'Might makes right,' and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.

Remain strong in your faith, as you were in former years. In this faith, in its close-knit unity our people to-day goes straight forward on its way and no power on earth will avail to stop it.

The National Socialist Movement has wrought this miracle. If Almighty God granted success to this work, then the Party was His instrument.

When our party had only seven men, it already had two principles. First, it wanted to be a party with a true ideology. And second, it wanted to be the one and only power in Germany.

I have been Europe's last hope. She proved incapable of refashioning herself by means of voluntary reform. She showed herself impervious to charm and persuasion. To take her I had to use violence. (26th February)

With the defeat of the Reich and pending the emergence of the Asiatic, the African and, perhaps, the South American nationalisms, there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other-the United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will compel these two Powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology. (2nd April 1945)

The heart of government, coated with whatever velvet gloves you want to put on it, is a mailed fist of force and coercion.

We must reject dictatorship in whatever form it takes--and especially when it rears its head in our own midst on the bench.

Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead.

Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.

Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

The nation that secures control of the air will ultimately control the world.

The striving for significance, this sense of yearning, always points out to us that all psychological phenomena contain a movement that starts from a feeling of inferiority and reach upward. The theory of Individual Psychology of psychological compensation states that the stronger the feeling of inferiority, the higher the goal for personal power.

Going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful.

These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.

It was settled by the Constitution, the laws, and the whole practice of the government that the entire executive power is vested in the President of the United States.

No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody.

Any president can start a war, and use the chaos of disorder that such a war creates as an indefinite argument for prolonging it. It's a war that keeps on giving. Failure means it's even more necessary to keep failing.

When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.

We stole their babes and mothers, chiefs and braves Although we held the whip, you knew we were The real slaves To alchemy, human alchemy.

We were terrified that Jones would settle. It was contrary to our purpose of bringing down the president.

This is the way addled liberals really think. Even as they champion sucking the brains out of little babies, they think of themselves as indelibly compassionate because they favor an overweening, behemoth federal government.

They should rule who are able to rule best.

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.

Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

The majority is always sane.

The error arises from the learned jurists deceiving themselves and others, by asserting that government is not what it really is, one set of men banded together to oppress another set of men, but, as shown by science, is the representation of the citizens in their collective capacity.

In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs, and other heads of states.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a 'dictator' substitutes himself for the central committee.

Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

Any community's arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

The United States has the power to destroy the world, but not the power to save it alone.

There is a sort of an unwritten code in Washington, among the underworld and the hustlers and these other guys that I am their friend.

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to afflict the world so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully.

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick.'

'Never ask for anything! Never for anything, and especially from those who are stronger than you. They'll make the offer themselves, and give everything themselves.'

Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated - a system of checks and balances.

God gave me this illness to remind me that I'm not number One; He is.

Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.

The United States now sleeps under a Soviet moon.

Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.

The long tradition of naivete and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the third world, if such a warning is needed, as to how our protestations of sincerity and benign intent are to be interpreted.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word Liberty entire nations.

Because these fools always look up for power. People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up.

War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

The people with money to build today are corporations -- they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

Asks the Possible of the Impossible, 'Where is your dwelling-place?' 'In the dreams of the Impotent,' comes the answer.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

There is no knowledge that is not power.

If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.

When you strike at a King, you must kill him.

'A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.'

We scientists are clever - too clever - are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it.

America's true power lies not in its will to dominate but in its ability to inspire.

The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siecle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. ... The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.

It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone.

All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.

Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as 'right' in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as 'brute force.'

If Nature is against us, we shall fight Nature, and make it obey.

A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest.

To make an end of all things on Earth, and our Planetical System of the World, he (God) need but put out the Sun.

All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest. Howsoever, he that for want of will or wit useth not those means, must rest in servitude and poverty.

Whoso taketh in hand to govern a multitude, either by way of liberty or principality, and cannot assure himself of those persons that are enemies to that enterprise, doth frame a state of short perseverance.

Whoso desireth to govern well and securely, it behoveth him to have a vigilant eye to the proceedings of great princes, and to consider seriously of their designs.

Money can't buy you friends, but you do get a better class of enemy.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

The system concedes nothing without demand, for it formulates its very method of operation on the basis that the ignorant will learn to know, the child will grow into an adult and therefore demands will begin to be made. It gears itself to resist demands in whatever way it sees fit.