Power - Quotes

All human power is a compound of time and patience. - Honore de Balzac

An empire built on power cannot attract the affections and loyalty that men bestow willingly on a regime of ideas and beauty. - Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson

And herein lies the secret of true power. Learn, by constant practice, how to husband your resources, and concentrate them, at any moment, upon a given point. - James Allen

Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken. - Abigail Adams

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. - George Washington

Authority and power are two different things: power is the force by means of which you can oblige others to obey you. Authority is the right to direct and command, to be listened to or obeyed by others. Authority requests power. Power without authority is tyranny. - Jacques Maritain

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you are not. - Unknown

Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force. - Euripides

Even the wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face of the same colour. - Walter Savage Landor

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power. - Rene Descartes

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? - Ursula K. le Guin

He who looks for great power searches for perils. - Edward Counsel

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be. - Thomas Jefferson

If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them. - Saul Alinsky

If you are born to power, you must prove you deserve it through good works – or give it up. To do any less is to act without conscience. - Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson

If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful. - Samuel R. Delany

It is a mistake, that a lust for power is the mark of a great mind; for even the weakest have been captivated by it; and for minds of the highest order, it has no charms. - Charles Caleb Colton

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. - Aung San Suu Kyi

Men in great place are thrice servants; servants of the sovereign state, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self. - John Locke

Men in power are always interested in greater power. - Dan Brown

Never doubt what small men will do for great power. - Paolo Bacigalupi

No beast is more savage than man when possessed with power answerable to his rage. - Plutarch

Nothing has any power over me other than that which I give it through conscious thoughts. - Tony Robbins

Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominance. - Joseph Addison

Nothing unmasks a man like his use of power. - Elbert Hubbard

One of the things about powerful people is they have the ability to make it look easy. - Ice-T

One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim. - Frank Herbert

Perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who ... have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well. - J. K. Rowling

Power – a currency that never went out of style. - Dan Simmons 

Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it. - Frank Herbert

Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. - Frank Herbert

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power. - George Bernard Shaw

Power deludes the ones who wield it. - Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson

Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in striking true. - Honore de Balzac

Power has only one duty – to secure the social welfare of the People. - Benjamin Disraeli

Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best. - Edward Abbey

Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare! - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Power is just using energy in a wise way to get things done. Power has been misinterpreted to mean getting my way on the backs of other people. Getting whatever I want, forgetting that there are other beings and species and energies involved. - Elizabeth Lesser

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. - Saul David Alinsky

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. - George Orwell

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. - Henry Kissinger

Power is what men seek, and any group that gets it will abuse it. It is the same story. - Lincoln Steffens

Power may justly be compared to a great river; while kept within it bounds it is both beautiful and useful, but when it overflows its banks, it is then too impetuous to be stemmed; it bears down all before it, and brings destruction and desolation wherever it comes. - Andrew Hamilton

Power seems to confer on its possessor a mantle of superiority, specialness, and sexual potency, which the envious person desperately wants because he feels himself on some level to be inferior, unimportant, and impotent. - Alexander Lowen

Power should act and not talk. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. - Unknown

Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality ... and fall. - Frank Herbert

Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power. - Charles Colton 

Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whate'er it touches. - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. - Bertrand Russell

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us. - Theodor W. Adorno

The great fish swallow up the small; and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government. - Abigail Adams

The greatest power is often simple patience. - E. Joseph Cossman

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse. - Edmund Burke

The less power a man has, the more he likes to use it. - Chinese Proverb

The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. - Unknown

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. - Alice Walker

The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it. - Edwin H. Land

The power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the understanding. - Nicholas Black Elk

The steps of power are often steps on sand. - Edward Counsel

The supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous character. - James Frazer

The truly powerful exert their influence in ways unseen, unfelt. Some would say that a thing visible is a thing vulnerable. - Guillermo del Toro

The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. - James Madison

The worst thing that can be said of the most powerful, is that they can take your life; but the same thing can be said of the most weak. - Charles Caleb Colton

Those who sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside. -  John F Kennedy

To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good. - Ursula K. le Guin

To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it: the pains of power are real, its pleasures imaginary. - Charles Caleb Colton

We all possess more power and greater possibilities than we realize, and visualizing is one of the greatest of these powers. - Genevieve Berhrend

Wealth was the short beer of existence. Power was champagne. - Stephen King

What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it. - Alexander Graham Bell

What we do not see, what most of us never suspect of existing, is the silent but irresistible power which comes to the rescue of those who fight on in the face of discouragement. - Napoleon Hill

When your power comes from others, on approval, you are their slave. - Tobias Wolfe

You see what power is – holding someone else’s fear in your hand and showing it to them! - Amy Tan