Quotes About Power

As a child of privilege, no one is your friend. They will claim to be your friends, they will laugh at your jokes and invite you to their parties, but they do not like you. They like your power, they like what you will become someday.

Pueden ordenar a la Luna que se vuelva azul, pero no por eso cambiará de color. Escucha,Ender, los comandantes tienen la autoridad que tú les permitas tener. Cuanto más obedeces, más poder tienen sobre ti.

At first it was the man of real authority they noticed, but later, where everyone had authority, it was his cargo they cared to see.

But he was never one of them; their relationship was too unequal. He had loved them so he could know them, and he had known them so he could use them.

Power will always end up with the sort of people who crave it.

He sat upon the hill, a Gatefather who was now but a shadow of himself, and wept. For all his crimes he wept, for all who had died before he could save them, for the mages he had stripped of power even more utterly than he had been stripped today. I held their outselves in my hearthoard for a thousand years, some of them, or more I made myself the thief of hearts, and now I am repaid.

My father once told me that there are no gods; only the cruel manipulations of evil people who pretended that their power was good and their exploitation was love. But if there are no gods; why are we so hungry to believe in them? Just because evil liars stand between us and the gods and block our view of them does not mean that the bright halo that surrounds each liar is not the outer edges of a god, waiting for us to find our way around the lie.

Since I don't have actual authority over anybody, Petra, how can it possibly matter if I'm not legitimately authorized?

Time to repay old humiliations, is that it, Bean? 'Of course,' Ender said contemptuously. 'I'm not as close to the floor as you are.

Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll choose as we think they should?

They have influence, but no power. In my experience, influence is power.

When the people elected a president like this one, who ran a campaign like the one he ran, it was hard to imagine what kind of scandal might bring him down.

We are the beasts that scheme, the predators that predict. We live by the lie, not by the truth; we study the truth only to shape more convincing lies that will bend other people to our will.

The task of the tyrant is not to compel, but to persuade even the unwilling that compliance better serves their interest than resistance.

A weak King must be what other Kings have been; a strong King is himself, and from then on the meaning of the name of King is changed.

when a government pretends that it is the highest judge of its own actions, the result is not freedom as Jefferson says, but chaos and oppression.

o poder de provocar dor é o único que conta, o poder de matar e destruir, já que, se você não puder matar, fica sempre à mercê daqueles que podem, e nada, nem ninguém, vai te salvar

A real god doesn't care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods want to teach you how to be just like them.

Has anyone ever mentioned that when you smile, it would melt steel?

There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.

La Escuela de Batalla no nos ha creado, ya lo sabes. La Escuela de Batalla no crea nada. Solo destruye.

This is war, Father. I will never be free of you as long as you own this company and I am under your employ. I am done playing your little life lessons. It's time I taught you a few of my own.

The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win. Everybody thinks Hitler got to power because of his armies, because they were willing to kill, and that's partly true, because in the real world power is always built on the threat of death and dishonor. But mostly he got to power on words, on the right words at the right time.

Sometimes David kills Goliath, and people never forget. But there were a lot of little guys Goliath had already mashed into the ground. Nobody sang songs about those fights…