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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:

The power to perform is derived in toto from the inanimate world, however many elaborate metamorphoses it may undergo, and through however many organisms, vegetable and animal, it may pass before it reaches man.

Frederick Soddy Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)

Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class. (p. 136)

Marshall McLuhan The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

I think of that word, power, and what it means.
It means you feed your people, you help the world.
I never understood what else there was to it
But I watched its struggles daily, its games

Linda Hogan fragment from Indios (2012)

In every age its [liberty's] progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man's craving for power, and the poor man's craving for food.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

I hate government. I hate power. I think that man's existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Issues that once divided Conservatives from Liberal Democrats are now issues where we both agree. Our attitude to devolution and localisation of power. Iraq. The environment. I'm a liberal Conservative.

David Cameron

Congress needs to reclaim our power... over the use of force.

Elissa Slotkin Senator Slotkin Delivers Speech on Trump's Authoritarian Playbook (2025)

A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this affected many of the scientists in a subtle sense, and it diminished their desire to continue to work on the bomb.

Leó Szilárd

No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.

Buenaventura Durruti Van Paassen interview (1936)

I do not know why everybody says that I am after power. If I were after power, I would have accepted it in 1996 when so many leaders came to my residence asking me to become prime minister.

V. P. Singh

The first monotheist religion known... appeared in Egypt, c.1350 BC, when Pharaoh Akhenaten declared... one of the minor deties... Aten... supreme power ruling the universe.

Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

A power guided my hand. If an invisible company
waited to see what I would do,
I in my own way asked for
direction, so we should journey together
a little nearer the accomplishment
of the design.

R. S. Thomas Frequencies (1978)

Whatever my aims and agendas were, I never asked for power. I think they need me. I don't think it's addictive. I think, if anything, it's the opposite of addictive. You want to run away from it, but it doesn't let you go. It's doing it again.

Benazir Bhutto

Then you have people who say, "It must be a totalitarian society. Only a totalitarian system like Bolshevism or... Nazism. The immense powers of industry can only be controlled by a totalitarian society."

Yuval Noah Harari Next Phase of Intelligence (2026)

I was douted
about flying
while my shoulders
was bent
under the pressure of
the power of the wings

Ahmad Shamlou

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.

Margaret Thatcher Misattributed

Odin, thou whirlwind, what a threat is this
Thou threatenest what transcends thy might, even thine,
For of all powers the mightiest far art thou,
Lord over men on earth, and Gods in Heaven;
Yet even from thee thyself hath been withheld
One thing—to undo what thou thyself hast ruled.

Matthew Arnold Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

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