Quotes About Power

If Frau Rasch, in the last and fullest days of her husband's power in Brno, had idly—during a party, say; a musical recital at the castle—gazed into the core of the diamond that had come to her from Oskar Schindler, she would have seen reflected there the worst incubus from her own dreams and her Führer's. An armed Marxist Jew.

Once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world.

In our cynical world, where suspicion is a necessity, insisting that something is true is not nearly as powerful as suggesting that something might be true.

Stories are wondrous things. And they are dangerous."

The fact is, the primary way that Ottawa and Washington deal with Native people is to ignore us. They know that the court system favors the powerful and the wealthy and the influential, and that, if we buy into the notion of an impartial justice system, tribes and bands can be forced through a long, convoluted, and expensive process designed to wear us down and bankrupt our economies. Be good. Play by our rules. Don't cause a disturbance.

Fear shall force what friendship cannot win.

Where words prevail not, violence prevails; But gold doth more than either of them both.

Now by the sorrows of the souls in hell, Who first lays hand on me, I'll be his priest

Wars are begun by frightened men.

As Vulcan's troublesome history reveals, no one gives up on a powerful, or a beautiful, or perhaps simply a familiar and useful conception of the world without utter compulsion – and a real alternative.

The divine right of kings may now be acknowledged as a fabrication, a falsified permit for prideful dementia and impulsive mayhem. The inalienable rights of certain people, on the other hand, seemingly remain current: somehow we believe they are not fabrications because hallowed documents declare they are real.

Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily—by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn one edge toward himself.

One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses theme and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

Work with what you have control of and you'll have your hands full.

Not drunk is he who from the floorCan rise alone and still drink more;But drunk is he who prostrate lies,Without the power to drink or rise.

The advance of our technology is coincidental with the loss of our appetite for ethical questions that ought to attend the implications of these new powers. . . In the name of diversity, any idea is regarded as worthy as any other; any nonsense is entitled to a forum, a full hearing, and equal time.

The problem is that we've got a sense of humor and (Republicans have) got guns. Will we die laughing?

As the political scientist Ian Bremmer wrote in the run-up to the U.S. elections of 2020, victims seek saviors, and there is never a shortage of volunteers.

In a passage often cited by Western conservatives and especially loved by American libertarians, the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek wrote in 1960: "The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.

If you are not in control of your thoughts then you are not in control of yourself. Without self-control, you have no real power, regardless of whatever else you accomplish. If you are not aware of the thoughts that you are thinking in each moment, then you are the rider with no reins, with no power over where you are going. You cannot control what you are not aware of. Awareness must come first.

If you are not in control of your thoughts, then you are not in control of yourself. Without self-control, you have no real power,

The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.

Everything is politics.