An untoward event. (Threatening to disturb the balance of power.)
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.
In the main it will be found that a power over a man's support [salary] is a power over his will.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
There is nothing which power cannot believe of itself, when it is praised as equal to the gods.
I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.
The first duty of power is to perpetuate itself. The first duty of free men is to resist it.
In the struggle between those seeking power there is no middle course.