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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:

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

Thomas Jefferson

Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.

Friedrich Nietzsche

[T]yranny is a deviant form of monarchy.

Allen C. Guelzo

Let us turn our backs on power.

Pope Francis

. . . How stern
And desolate a tract is this wide world!
How withered all the buds of natural good!
No shade, no shelter from the sweeping storms
Of pitiless power!

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab (1813)

So mightiest powers by deepest calms are fed,
And sleep, how oft, in things that gentlest be!

Bryan Procter

And deal damnation round the land.

Alexander Pope

One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: 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

When I resist, therefore, when I as a Democrat resist the concentration of power, I am resisting the processes of death, because the concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human initiative, and, therefore of human energy.

Woodrow Wilson

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

Robert Frost

Tacitus appears to have been as great an enthusiast as Petrarch for the revival of the republic and universal empire. He has exerted the vengeance of history upon the emperors, but has veiled the conspiracies against them, and the incorrigible corruption of the people which probably provoked their most atrocious cruelties. Tyranny can scarcely be practised upon a virtuous and wise people.

John Adams

The power of Kings and Magistrates is nothing else, but what is only derivative, transferr'd and committed to them in trust from the People, to the Common good of them all, in whom the power yet remaines fundamentally, and cannot be tak'n from them, without a violation of thir natural birthright.

John Milton

[P]ower, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

James Madison

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats, tho' unseen, amongst us.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Clever tyrants are never punished.

Voltaire

One must distinguish well arbitrariness from tyranny. Tyranny can be exercised by means of law itself, and then is not arbitrariness; arbitrariness can be exercised in the interest of the governed, and then it is not tyrannical.

Alexis de Tocqueville

One tenth of one percent of the population controls more than forty percent of the wealth. Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. If you are to be a truly Christian nation you must solve this problem.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Americans have lost control of the machinery of their society, and only new values and a new culture can restore control. Its emotions and spirit can be comprehended only by seeing contemporary America through the eyes of the new generation.

Charles A. Reich The Greening of America (1970)

Man's need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality – but no control is possible in a universe which, by one's own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if man proposes, but a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house.

Nathaniel Branden Mental Health versus Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice (1963)

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) ... the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

J. R. R. Tolkien The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)

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