Quotes About Power

Paranormalists, however, insist that our minds are transmitters that, with special effort, can focus like lasers to communicate across great distances, and even make things happen. That may seem far-fetched, but it's also a definition of prayer.

You understand... just what the Taoists mean when they say that soft is stronger than hard.

I intend to dance once with everybody - except the other Joy. I'm going to dance twice with the other Joy. Why? Because being unusually kind to someone will give me a feeling of power.

The other world improvers point out that parliament is an alliance of monarchs, lords, bishops, lawyers, merchants, bankers, brokers, industrialists, military men, landlords and civil servants who run it to protect their wealth AND FOR NO OTHER REASON.

Our system of class prejudice is the cleverest piece of self-frustrating daftness since the Tower of Babel, it benefits nobody but a few at the top. We fool ourselves into fooling others into fooling ourselves even more.

Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means

All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely.

Cowards were exactly the kind of people you wanted around nuclear technology.

T]he world we live in is governed by the most revolting bunch of crooks ever to defile the soil of this planet... [You] must never take them seriously, which is exactly what they want.

Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.

An empty stomach is not a good political adviser.

To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.

The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)

One picture is worth a thousand words

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.

Politics is for the moment and equation is for eternity.

Subtle is the Lord. Malicious, He is not.

The strongest force in the universe is Compound Interest.

An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion soon degenerates. For force always attract men of low morality.

In two weeks the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties.

The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.