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.
The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.
For what can power give more than food and drink,
To live at ease, and not be bound to think?
He never sold the truth to serve the hour,
Nor paltered with Eternal God for power.
No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
But the whole boundless continent is yours.
This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues,
Was once thought honest.
I knew him tyrannous, and tyrants' fears
Decrease not, but grow faster than the years.