Quotes About Power

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.

Offices are as acceptable here as elsewhere, and whenever a man has cast a longing eye on them, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should to rest on inference.

Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.

Democracy is 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

He [King George III] has erected a multitude of New Offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. That government is best which governs least.

No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it...To myself, personally, it brings nothing but increasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.

One man with courage is a majority.

Perfect happiness I believe was never intended by the deity to be the lot of any one of his creatures in this world; but that he has very much put in our power the nearness of our approaches to it, is what I as stedfastly believe.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and governments to gain ground.

When a man has cast his longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves ; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

All of us have been through the process of being born and entering this world with three essential biological needs: security and survival, power and control, affection and esteem.

Perhaps 90 percent of its desires, psychologists say, are unconscious; in other words, many of our deepest commitments to symbols of security, power, and affection in the culture are rooted in desires that are absolutely impossible to achieve.

Life from the Center is a life of unhurried peace and power. It is serene and radiant. It takes no time, but it occupies all our time, making our life programs new and overcoming. We need not get frantic. Love is at the helm. And when our little day is done, we lie down quietly in peace, for all is well. from A TESTAMENT OF DEVOTION

Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't

Sometimes tyrants do away with the necessity of satire by imposing absurdity themselves.