Quotes About Power

That was the year the British decided to get out and sell everything. So I immediately held an election. I knew the people will be dead scared. And I won my bet big-time. The gullible fools!

First, we had to get rid of the British.... To do that, you had to mobilize support from the widest possible group and get as big a majority of the population as you could.... First, you've got to get power. Then, having got power, you say, What's the problem? Have I said these things? If so, let's forget it.

Landlords are enemies of the workers," Hansu said.

When trying to get people to change familiar ways of doing things, social pressures and constraints exerted by the informal peer group represent the most potent restraining force that must be overcome and, at the same time, the most powerful inducing force that can be exploited to achieve success.

The first principle concerns the power and subtlety of situational influences. The second involves the importance of people's subjective interpretations of the situation. The third speaks to the necessity of understanding both individual psyches and social groups as tension systems or energy "fields" characterized by an equilibrium between impelling and restraining forces.

One of the hardest lessons to learn in academic life—and for me one of the most disconcerting—is the speed with which a radical insurgency can become orthodoxy. In just a few years a generation of students championing a dangerous new idea are elevated by an initial success into professorships. From these positions of influence they form a powerful network of academic power brokers, which they use to ensure the continuation of the revolution.

Racism is when you have laws set up, systematically put in a way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a people. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing ... then it will be done, but not until then.

What did Doctor Doom really want? He wanted to rule the world. Now, think about this. You could walk across the street against a traffic light and get a summons for jaywalking, but you could walk up to a police officer and say "I want to rule the world," and there's nothing he can do about it, that is not a crime. Anybody can want to rule the world. So, even though he was the Fantastic Four's greatest menace, in my mind, he was never a criminal!

The power of prayer is still the greatest ever known in this endless eternal universe.

Mother Teresa used the analogy of electricity: "The wire is you and me; the current is God," she said. "We have the power to let the current pass through us, use us, and produce the light of the world—Jesus.

Fortunes are wrung from the smallest of things That once were ignored, turning men into kings.

A great doctor kills more people than a great general.

When God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God.

As long as there are crazed or crafty leaders to play on old fears, a mob will turn cruel.

Girls without Pasts don't keep guns in their dressing rooms.

The most tangible of all visible mysteries - fire.

And as we mean to be very powerful writers, as well as every thing else that is desirable, power is never seen to so much advantage as when it goes about a thing carelessly; you like to see a light horseman, who seems as if he could abolish you with a passing cut, and not a great heavy fellow, who looks as if he should tumble down in case of missing you, or a little red staring busy body, who would be obliged to wield his sword two-handed, and kill himself first with exertion.

Mother Nature is not beneficent. She is not maleficent either of course. Merely augustly, majestically capricious.

Might does not make right, but right demands that those who hold to it should defend it with all their might.

Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.

The study showed women who were slower to smile in corporate life were perceived as more credible." As Missy talked, I began to think about history-making women like Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Madeleine Albright, and other powerful women of their ilk. Not one was known for her quick smile. Missy continued, "The study went on to say a big, warm smile is an asset. But only when it comes a little slower, because then it has more credibility." From that moment on

Your eyes are personal grenades that have the power to detonate people's emotions.

It took him years to learn the value of silence, the power of carefully chosen words.

1824: "Let everyone in love come and see. I want to break Venus's ribs with clubs and cripple the goddess's loins. If she can strike through my soft chest, then why can't I smash her head with a club?