Skip to content

Power Quotes

This is a smaller page, and the top names are Shakespeare, Tacitus, Jefferson, John Adams and Michel Foucault. Bertrand Russell supplies the best-sourced material. His Power: A New Social Analysis (1938) argues that power is to social science what energy is to physics, and an earlier essay (1928) adds that after enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure is preventing others from enjoying themselves. Emerson, in 1876, has a gentler view: that thoughts rule the world.

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t” is credited to Margaret Thatcher and is the only entry on the page flagged as misattributed.

Random quote on Power

Most quoted on power:

The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.

John Adams A Defence of the Constitutions of Government (1787)

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

Robert Anton Wilson

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.

Martin Buber What is Man? (1938)

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

C. S. Lewis God in the Dock (1970)

Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.

Martin Buber Power and Love (1926)

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

Martin Buber Between Man and Man (1965)

Feminism, coveting social power, is blind to women’s cosmic sexual power.

Camille Paglia Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Mao Zedong

People with real power never fear of losing it. People with control think of little else.

Joss Whedon

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

Bertrand Russell Sceptical Essays (1928)

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfillment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Letters and Social Aims (1876)

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Carl Jung The Psychology of the Unconscious (1943)

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

James Madison

The best education will not immunize a person against corruption by power.

Eric Hoffer Before the Sabbath (1979)

To study Buddhism and then use it as a weapon in order to criticize others' theories or ideologies is wrong. The very purpose of religion is to control yourself, not to criticize others.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness (1990)

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic.

Alan Moore The Mindscape of Alan Moore (2003)

You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

Sam Harris Free Will (2012)

Politics is the art of making the people believe that they are in power, when in fact, they have none.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Related topics