Quotes About Power

Now, we can't stop the devil from coming against us, but we can overcome him each time - if we exercise the authority of Jesus and decide not to put up with him.

Fame overcomes everything.

Human life is fragile, and the threat posed to individuals in politics cannot be overlooked.

Law and politics are often overly complicated because there are people that don't want the rest of us to know what's going on.

What happens when the guy who runs the reactor gets out of bed wrong or decides, for some reason, that he wants to override his instruction sheet some afternoon?

Booksellers initially thought of Amazon as their best friend. They were coming in, and they were challenging Barnes and Noble, and Borders, which were the big, dominant corporations of the day, and that they would disrupt them and make them less powerful, but they could never envision that Amazon would overtake them all.

Paradoxically, resource-rich developing countries are often worse off than comparable countries that lack those resources. One reason for this is that large resource endowments provide a huge financial incentive for attempts to overthrow the government and seize power.

There is always a reason behind things that are made, and if there isn't, there will be one when they travel through the world. The objects of beauty are used to impress, seduce, overwhelm, make money, support identities, and show power or style, among other things.

After the 1960s and '70s, there were real doubts about whether a mortal man could handle the country's highest office. It had destroyed Johnson, corrupted Nixon, and overwhelmed Ford and Carter.

Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient power is never a necessary condition of leadership. There is never sufficient power. In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership.

years, no goal of Washington—not a single one—has been accomplished by war.

She had been told of a thing that sounded like a locomotive. And that thing was a flood.

The gun was like his guitar: a thing that had power because of the hole in the middle. Maybe like Ingersoll, too, for that matter.

Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.

The system has become corrupt. It's working backwards. It's not advancing the most worthy among us, the most virtuous, the hardest working, the most humble, the smartest, even the strongest, but the most devious, the best liars, the sociopaths and narcissists,

You look at the greatest villains in human history, the fascists, the autocrats, they all wanted people to kneel before them because they don't love themselves enough.

that there existed no earthly empire so great or overweening that it might not one day be dashed to pieces

Like unmixed wine, the dictatorship had a taste that was intoxicating and perilous.

The dictator himself cast his reforms as a restoration, the sweeping away of clutter. Yet clutter was the essence of the Republic

T]here [is] no limit to what might not be achieved by an alliance between an imperial monarchy and revelations, if truly believed to be heaven-sent, of a prophet.

Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state.

Every member of every tribe was entitled to his vote, but since this had to be delivered in person at the Ovile the practical effect was to ensure that only the wealthiest out-of-towner could afford to travel to Rome to exercise his right. Inevitably, this served to skew the voting in favor of the rich.

Coloured marble, pompous avenues, urban planning: what were these, if not the prerogatives of kings? No one, in a free republic, could be permitted such sinister grandstanding. This was why, in the last feverish decade before the crossing of the Rubicon, the sudden appearance in Rome of a rash of grandiose monuments had served as portents of the Republic's ruin.

Vast and implacable, like a kraken of the deep undisturbed by storms raging across the ocean surface, the apparatus of empire still coiled its prodigious tentacles, ready to flex and squeeze its victims tightly, as it had ever done.