Quotes About Power

People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.

What the government will or will not do is finally beside the point. If people do not have the government they want, then they will have a government that they must either change or endure. Finally

The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth.

But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

An infinitely greedy sovereign is afoot in the universe, staking his claims.

But do the Lords of War in fact hate the world? That would be easy to bear, if so. If they hated their children and the flowers that grow in the warming light, that would be easy to bear. For then we could hate the haters and be right. What is hard is to imagine the Lords of War may love the things that they destroy.

The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge.

The most appropriate governmental powers are negative-those, that is, that protect the small and the weak from the great and powerful, not those by which the government becomes the profligate, ineffectual parent of the small and weak after it has permitted the great and powerful to make them helpless.

The question stands and waits, to be asked and asked, never finally to be answered, which he believes affirms a kind of faith. The world is fitted together, is held in its place in the great sky, has held together so far, through the worst of human damage so far, and by no human's power to save or make or know. That he can sometimes fit a mere poem's parts together is his fallback position, a sign of his limits, his formal ignorance, his faith in the great coherence.

Whereas his father only ruled him, Aunt Molly owned him outright, at least when he was in the house where she could get at him.

If we have equality and nothing else — no compassion, no magnanimity, no courtesy, no sense of mutual obligation and dependence, no imagination — then power and wealth will have their way; brutality will rule.

Having paid for life, we receive death. By now, in this nineteen hundred and eighty-sixth Year of Our Lord, we all have purchased how many shares in death? How many bombs, shells, mines, guns, grenades, poisons, anonymous murders, nameless sufferings, official secrets? But not the controlling share. Death cannot be marketed in controlling shares.

Somewhere underneath of all the politics, the ambition, the harsh talk, the power, the violence, the will to destroy and waste and maim and burn, was this tenderness. Tenderness born into madness, preservable only by suffering, and finally not preservable at all. What can love do? Love waits, if it must, maybe forever.

Though we invite, this healing comes in answer to another voice than ours; a strength not ours returns

By their ignorance people enfranchise their exploiters.

This is the real power of joy, to make us certain that, beneath all grief, the most fundamental of realities is joy itself.

I can call spirits from the vasty deep

When people see you're happy doing what you're doing, it sort of takes the power away from them to tease you about it.

The philanthropist who could not pass a beggar without parting with his money, the nature lover who felt he did not have the right to stamp on a spider let alone mistreat a horse, the humanitarian who opposed slavery because it was the "absolute dependence of one man upon another," was utterly convinced he had every right to keep a young woman subject to his total command and groom her to meet his desires

Yet at a time when people were locked in debate over the significance of nature over nurture, Day's project did not seem quite so outlandish or immoral. As a product of his time, his gender and his rank, he possessed the power and money to pursue his quest, and he therefore believed he had every right to subvert another person to meet his ideals. He was, perhaps, more deluded than wicked

She drove her chariot like a centurion.

the entities that possess them, and the extraordinary power that accompanies them, are not necessarily going to also be more ethically advanced than us.

The dead do not need to be called by any special techniques. The essential element is not skill, it's love—that is to say, the creative power of objective love.

Now, I've always known that there were bullies in the world. We've seen a lot of it in politics lately as well as in daily life. You see it where people who may be stronger, or bigger, or better with verbiage than other folks... show off. To me, that's what bullying is, showing off. It's saying, I'm better than you, I can take you down. Not just physically, but emotionally.