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.
Sometimes wealth and power merely created the desire for more of the same.
No political party should ever be given permanent, unchallenged power.
How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?
'Power' is an ominous and sinister word in all these tales, except as applied to the gods.
There is more power in the open hand than in the clenched fist.
The processes of power are pervasive, complex, and often disguised in our society.
History is full of the accounts of those who imposed their absolute power against popular will.
To be a revolutionary you have to be a human being. You have to care about people who have no power.
The main problem in the world is that power, and wealth is in the hands of a few elite.