quotations about power
Power unsubjected to the control of virtue is a poor guardian of civil liberty.
J. P. ZENGER
attributed, Day's Collacon
So long as there is an uneasy class, a class which has not its just power, it will rashly clutch and blindly believe the notion that all men should have the same power.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The love of power is the demon of all men.
TONGAYI CHIRISA
"The Sin Eater", Sleepy Hollow
Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
RALPH ELLISON
Invisible Man
One of the things about powerful people is they have the ability to make it look easy.
ICE-T
Men's Health, December 2005
Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality ... and fall.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune Messiah
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
Children of Dune
Power changes everything till it is difficult to say who are the heroes and who the villains.
LIBBA BRAY
The Sweet Far Thing
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Waiting for the Barbarians
When your power comes from others, on approval, you are their slave.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Old School
All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
With great power there must also come ... great responsibility!
STAN LEE
Amazing Fantasy #15, August 1962
If any man is rich and powerful, he comes under that law of God by which the higher branches must take the burnings of the sun, and shade those that are lower; by which the tall trees must protect the weak plants beneath them.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
PAULO FREIRE
The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation
Nothing is more untrue than the famous saying of an ancient historian, that power is retained by the same arts by which it is acquired; untrue at least for men, though truer in the case of nations.
LORD ACTON
letter to Mary Gladstone, June 1, 1880
The depositary of power is always unpopular.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Coningsby
Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.
JOHN ADAMS
Novanglus Essays, No. 3
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
Narcissism: Denial of the True Self
He who looks for great power searches for perils.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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 J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Atreides