Quotes About Power

My job as energy and climate change secretary is to both power the country and protect the planet. Nuclear power delivers on both of these objectives.

Politics can cloud objectivity.

If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command?

There never was a democracy yet where the people didn't vote themselves into oblivion.

With a fantasy world, it's like, this is my world. I literally made it. So if I tell you something, you do have to sit back and observe more. You need to sit back and listen more to understand what is going on or what's happening in the world. And I think there's a lot of power in that.

I own 'The New York Observer.'

I am not sure why, but I have been obsessed by the Atom Bomb ever since it first happened.

I firmly believe that a big part of the obsession with women's thinness comes from the same place as male power fantasies.

The D.C. playbook is obsolete. It's time for the people of California to bring the agenda to Washington, not the other way around.

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

I think it's obvious that democracy is something that is contagious, and it always has been.

Sometimes I don't even deliberate. I just decide from the bench, it's so obvious. The beautiful part is that I have carte blanche.

I love how when I say the world is still run by men, and sometimes I say the world is still run by white men, people gasp as if that's news. That's not news. That's obvious.

Fame in itself is, you know... It involves a whole discussion on just that word, 'fame.' It's a power; it's another degree of power, to be famous. I think it's obvious: you have more influence the more well-known you are. And, hopefully, it's righteously used.

It is so obvious that we are constantly monitored and manipulated both in advertising and in politics.

It was obvious after the '97 election that as long as there were two small-c conservative parties trying to destroy each other, the Liberals would win every election.

I feel strange when I get applauded by people in power... because it's obvious that it's them I'm criticizing, but they can't show that in front of the cameras. It's quite funny sometimes.

The events with Henry III happened, obviously the way it happened, liberties were taken.

I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.

Politics, I believe, is a full-time occupation.

The Occupy movement has drawn attention to how too many in the 1 percent get to play by their own rules while exploiting the 99 percent.

You've seen too many movies. If you're holding a gun and you shoot a defenseless man, then you're a poor creature, a dastardly person. That's a perfectly ridiculous idea, you realize. The fact that you're holding the gun and the other man is not is no accident. It's a product of everything you've achieved, it assumes that if you're . . . you're aware enough, you have the gun when you need it.

Sometimes I think our future existence will depend on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distortions of information will eventually choke us.

I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver's nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss.