Quotes About Power

Sticks and stones will break our bones, but words will break our hearts...

Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power.

God has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably found on the side of those in power.

There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.

No one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior to, and independent of nature.

In all ages hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns on the heads of thieves, called kings.

Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test.

That he attacked the religion of his time because it was cruel. That this excited the hatred of those in power, and that Christ was arrested, tried and crucified. For many centuries this great Peasant of Palestine has been worshiped as God.

Lewis Meggleton had given himself out as the last and the greatest of the prophets, having power to save or damn.

When you are young, and beautiful, you can be very cruel.

Those who did not know the ocean well forgot its solidity, its brutality.

Nobody who had not lived there would ever understand that London was a country unto itself. They might resent it for the fact that it held more power and money than any other British city, but they could not understand that poverty carried its own flavour there, where everything cost more, where the relentless distinctions between those who had succeeded and those who had not were constantly, painfully visible.

She emanated that aura of grandeur that replaces sexual allure in the successful older woman.

After a brief hesitation, the doctor accepted Strike's proffered hand, and as the two men shook, Robin wondered how aware men were of the power dynamics that played out between them, while women stood watching.

there's nothing like Latin for slapping the fuck out of people who think they're better than you. I've used it several times to good effect.

He was a rich white Conservative male, Mr. Strike, and he felt the corridors of power were best populated exclusively by rich white Conservative males. He sought, in everything, to restore a status quo he remembered in his youth. In pursuit of that objective, he was frequently unprincipled and certainly hypocritical.

And I swear to you, he looked murderous. He stepped right up to me, the way a man will when he wants to remind you what he could do, if he wanted.

Don't you think we tend to invest some categories of people with unearned goodness? I suppose we've all got a need to trust people who seem to have power over life and death.

Strike, who had heard the testimony of Brittany Brockbank and Rhona Laing and many others like them, knew that most women's rapists and killers were not strangers in masks who reached out of the dark space under the stairs. They were the father, the husband, the mother's or the sister's boyfriend...

She hadn't needed her own lawyer to point out that Matthew appeared to be trying to force her to spend money she didn't have on legal wrangling, to run down the clock and her resources until she walked away with as close to nothing as he could manage.

Well, that's the upper classes for you," said Strike. "By all means throttle their kids, but don't touch their horses.

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name…

Tis a strange mystery, the power of words! Life is in them, and death. A word can send The crimson colour hurrying to the cheek, Hurrying with many meanings, or can turn The current cold and deadly to the heart.

Robin wondered how aware men were of the power dynamics that played out between them, while women stood watching.