Quotes About Power

Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe;

Las palabras, como los rayos X, atraviesan cualquier cosa, si uno las emplea bien.

There was something called democracy. As though men were more than physico-chemically equal.

All of us desire a better state of society. But society cannot become better before two great tasks are performed.Unless peace can be firmly established and the prevailing obsession with money and power profoundly modified, there is no hope of any desirable change being made.

In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king." Mr. Bahu's face was positively twinkling with Voltairean glee. "He gets lynched.

Power and wealth increase in direct proportion to a man's distance from the material objects from which wealth and power are ultimately derived.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students—how to write piercingly.

In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better than one should suffer than that many should be corrupted.

Everybody wants power. Power in some form or other. [...] Some people want power to persecute other human beings; you expend your lust for power in persecuting words, twisting them, molding them, torturing them to obey you.

Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator's armory.

His intellectual eminence carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities. The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using—you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth or beauty that mattered. Happiness has got to be paid for. It hasn't been very good for truth of course. But it's been very good for happiness.

The power to respond to reason and truth exists in all of us. But so, unfortunately, does the tendency to respond to unrea­son and falsehood -- particularly in those cases where the falsehood evokes some enjoyable emotion, or where the appeal to unreason strikes some answering chord in the primitive, subhuman depths of our being.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

Un estado totalitario realmente eficaz sería aquel en el cual los jefes políticos todopoderosos y su ejército de colaboradores pudieran gobernar una población de esclavos sobre los cuales no fuese necesario ejercer coerción alguna por cuanto amarían su servidumbre. Inducirles a amarla es la tarea asignada en los actuales estados totalitarios a los ministerios de propaganda, los directores de los periódicos y los maestros de escuela.

VÄ›cí vlády je zasedat, nikoli mlátit. Vládne se hlavou a zadkem, nikoli pÄ›stí.

If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.

He wanted to make the children understand that all gods are homemade, and that it's we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.

Reformers should aim at delivering men from the temptations of sloth no less than from the temptations of ambition, avarice and the lust for power and position. Conversely, no reform which leaves the masses of the people wallowing in the slothful irresponsibility of passive obedience to authority can be counted as genuine change for the better.

Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.

It is by manipulating "hidden forces" that the advertising experts induce us to buy their wares—a toothpaste, a brand of cigarettes, a political candidate. And it is by appealing to the same hidden forces—and to others too dangerous for Madison Avenue to meddle with—that Hitler induced the German masses to buy themselves a Fuehrer, an insane philosophy and the Second World War.

The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word—these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.