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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:

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

William Pitt speaking of the case of John Wilkes (1770)

I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

Hitler set up a tyranny: a state with a mighty police force, a growing army, a host of spies and informers, a secret espionage, backed by swift and cruel punishment, which migh vary from loss of job to imprisonment, incommunicado and without trial, to cold murder.

W. E. B. Du Bois

To prevent government from becoming corrupt and tyrannous, its organization and methods should be as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it should be kept as close to the people and as directly within their control as may be.

Henry George Social Problems (1883)

Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.

Michel Foucault

Could this have just happened? . . . I can’t believe that ... Some Power put all this into orbit and keeps it there.

John Glenn

A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does not want to do, in quick succession, but he may also exercise power over him by shaping or determining his very wants. Indeed, is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have – that is, to secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires?

Steven Lukes Power: A Radical View (1974)

The idea of freedom is the mask of the tyrant.

Octavio Paz

Bleed, bleed, poor country!
Great Tyranny! lay thou thy basis sure,
For goodness dares not check thee!

William Shakespeare Macbeth (1605)

Tyranny
Is far the worst of treasons. Dost thou deem
None rebels except subjects? The prince who
Neglects or violates his trust is more
A brigand than the robber-chief.

Lord Byron

Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle.

Shulamith Firestone

All states are forced to strive for a monopoly on power.

Cindy Milstein

Give me a lever long enough
And a prop strong enough,
I can single handed move the world.

Archimedes

At a certain point power becomes very frightening, and to really begin to reconstruct civilization means to really act in a powerful way. And power is the thing that women have been taught is a real taboo.

Judy Chicago In an interview with Ann Stubbs on New York City's WBAI (1981)

Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator. Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies.

Lawrence Lessig May the Source Be With You (2001)

The paramount question of the day is not political, is not religious, but is economic. The crying-out demand of today is for a circle of principles that shall forever make it impossible for one man to control another by controlling the means of his existence.

Voltairine de Cleyre The Economic Tendency of Freethought (1890)

Tyrants in the course of time must eventually be overthrown because of the continual opposition of the oppressed. It is an unchanging Law, a constant rule, the penalty is certain, albeit that it is very slow coming to fruition.

Francesco Mario Pagano

Power is everywhere ... because it comes from everywhere.

Michel Foucault

There are clear and predictable consequences for the world if human beings continue to rape the earth and plunder its resources; to exploit, oppress, and dominate the weak and the poor for the sake of greed and the hunger for power; to depend on ever-rising levels of violence and ever more lethal instruments of death and destruction in order to secure positions of power and privilege.

Allan Boesak Comfort and Protest (1987)

I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. … That's why we've got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.

Kurt Vonnegut

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