Quotes About Power

been overthrown by their own protégés! Remember how often leaders have chosen to treat their friends like slaves—and then perished in the revolutions caused by their idiotic methods! How many powerful men have craved to dominate the world—and by overreaching have lost everything they once possessed!

I do not see how one who is an enemy of the gods can run fast enough away, nor where he can flee to escape, nor what darkness could cover him, nor how he could find a position strong enough for refuge. For all things in all places are subject to the gods, and the power of the gods extends equally over everything.

It is always the cunning, not the naïve, who rise to power, and leaders must use artfulness to make any organization whatsoever work well. Yet they must never be guided by cynical and self-serving counsels. If they don't call upon their higher selves, they will descend further into petty egotism and tyrannical behavior. As

today when I think of the treacherous cunning of many men who wear crowns—creatures like the king of Assyria—I can only think of how dishonorable it would be to let them remain in power." I

and in general, every ordinance made without the consent of those who are to obey it, is a violence rather than a law. And is

So violence is not to be expected of those who exercise reason; such conduct belongs to those who have strength without judgement.

Now, my maxim would be precisely converse: if you attack with a prospect of superiority, do not grudge employing all the power at your command; excess of victory (14) never yet caused any conqueror one pang of remorse.

I, Suethes, on the other hand, consider that there are no nobler and more brilliant possessions that a man, and particularly a man who holds power, can have than honour and fair dealing and generosity. A man who has these is rich in the possession of many friends and rich in the fact that many others want to become friends of his.

The power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance.

the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.

Don't you bully me with your politeness!

Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.

If you went to a home, kicked down the front door, chased the people who lived there out into the street and said, Go! You are free! Free as a bird! Go! Go! -- do you think they would shout and dance for joy? They wouldn't. Birds are not free. The people you've just evicted would sputter, With what right do you throw us out? This is our home. We own it. We have lived here for years. We're calling the police, you scoundrel.

I am magical: I can bleed for five days and not die.

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence were something weak and helpless.

My agency was pure and miraculous. It conferred power upon me.

I can't understand how a man who seems never to read imaginative writing of any kind (novels, poetry, short stories, high-brow, middle-brow, low-brow, anything) can understand life, people, the world. I don't care if ordinary people read or not. It's not for me to say how people should live. But people who have power over me? I want them to read because their limited, impoverished dreams may become my nightmares.

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

His presence was overwhelming, yet equally evident was the lithesome grace of it.

What I had before me was a spectacle of wind and water, an earthquake of the senses, that even Hollywood couldn't orchestrate.

Hard work unlocks the doors of wisdom, everything in this universe is made up of the same component. That component is energy. That's right, energy!

Language is the gateway to the human world. (...) Language is far older than civilization. (...) The fact that it is possible to teach apes to ride bicycles, but impossible to teach them to talk, suggests that it is the use of language rather than the use of tools which is the essential characteristic of humanity. The word, not the sword or the spade, is the power that has created human culture.

the establishment of a universal system of public education inevitably changed the relations of education to the state. It is this above all else which has caused the mind of our society to lose its independence, so that there is no power left outside politics to guide modern civilization, when the politicians go astray. For in proportion as education becomes controlled by the state, it becomes nationalized, and in extreme cases the servant of a political party.

The secular state becomes almost automatically totalitarian, so that no room is left for man's spiritual freedom.