Quotes About Power

Pues cuando Él quiere que una cosa se mueva, bien que la hace alargada, sean caminos o caballos o carros; pero cuando Él quiere que una cosa se esté quieta, la hace para arriba, como los árboles y los hombres.

I be dog if hit don't look like sometimes that when a fellow sets out to play a joke, hit ain't another fellow he's playing that joke on; hit's a kind of big power laying still somewhere in the dark that he sets out to prank with without knowing hit, and hit all depends on whether that ere power is in the notion to take a joke or not.

I found a way of writing where every word was as dangerous as a stick of dynamite." – William Faulkner

TRINA: I'm tired of all the happy men who rule the world. Their smile, their smile's their pedigree. They smile, but not for me. I'd like the chance to hide In their world. I'm happy, but I'm not at ease with that whole world.

The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. —JOSEPH CONRAD, The Mirror of the Sea

Its color was a muted gray-white until a wave reared; then turquoise floodlights seemed to switch on illuminating the wave's guts from the inside.

I've been reduced on certain magnificent days... to just drifting on the shoulder, gawking at the transformation of ordinary seawater into beautifully muscled swell, into feathering urgency, into pure energy, impossibly sculpted, ecstatically edged, and finally into violent foam.

ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure.

The power of a breaking wave does not increase fractionally with height, but as the square of its height. Thus a ten-foot wave is not slightly more powerful than an eight-foot wave—because the leap is not from eight to ten but from sixty-four to a hundred, making it over 50 percent more powerful. This is a brute fact that all surfers know in their bowels, whether or not they've heard the formula.

In this world, God must serve the Devil.

Money? in a voice that rustled.

Power does not corrupt people, people corrupt people.

Nothing can be given, which cannot also be withheld.

His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)

To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . .

Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory...

Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well.

Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable. Rule of thieves brings collapse, eventually, because they can't stop stealing.

Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable. Rule of thieves brings collapse, eventually, because they can't stop stealing.

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people.

She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers lightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails. She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.

The bosses, the big'uns, they can take all manner of things away from us. With their bloody laws and factories and courts and banks...they can make the world to their pleasure, they can take away your home and kin and even the work you do. But they can't ever take what you know, now can they, Sybil? They can't ever take that.

Once again, then," she said, "the divide between the ambitions of conspirators and the desire, among those bringing us word of those ambitions, to preserve whatever aspect of the status quo they themselves hold dear.

She wondered how powerful money could actually be, if one had enough of it, really enough. She supposed that only the Vireks of the world could really know, and very likely they were functionally incapable of knowing; asking Virek would be like interrogating a fish in order to learn more about water.