Quotes About Power

What he's about is destroying a government. Looking like a prime minister in waiting is a second-order consideration.

From the moment Julia Gillard became prime minister, Abbott's mantra has been: "If you want to stop the boats, you have to change the government." But for that to keep working in his favour, it's best the boats keep coming.

He was a God who observed without intervening in this hell he created -Carlisle

Manners matter as this author memorably illustrates. Eleanor Roosevelt stubbornly kept her clout behind Adlai Stevenson was an almost visceral resistance to John F. Kennedy's charms as a newcomer to power. The sudden death of Eleanor's granddaughter shortly before JFK was to meet with her suggested that rapprochement was impossible. Kennedy's genuine gentle manners toward the grieving former first lady won her over and may have shifted the balance in an extremely close election.

In the 1960 campaign, Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Adlai Stevenson, who already lost twice as the party's presidential nominee, He has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality, a certain frivolity, distractedness, over-interest in words and phrases.

No matter what office LBJ assumed he lifted greater than when he found it.

For our purposes, it is really only necessary to recognize that power is that which makes you go strong, while force makes you go weak. Love, compassion, and forgiveness, which may be mistakenly seen by some people as submissive, are in fact profoundly empowering. Revenge, judgmentalism, and condemnation, on the other hand, inevitably make you go weak.

Whiteness is not only false and oppressive, it is nothing but false and oppressive.

In the right situation, highly formalized, high-suction ass-kissing not only comes all too naturally to me, it makes me breathless with a feeling of penitential power.

Weak people are destructive; powerful people are constructive. Powerful people create, facilitate, and make things happen.

It is the power patriarchal societies try to diminish by infantalizing women by calling them doll, chick, babe, and girl regardless of their age.

Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.

I'm going to have you fired!" and I wanted to lean over and say, "I'm going to have you killed.

All I can say is that if it helps to have friends, it helps even more to have friends who are governors!

The guy in the T-shirt that pictures a semiautomatic rifle above the message COME AND TAKE IT, the one in fatigues buying two twelve-packs of beer and a tub of rice pudding, didn't necessarily vote Republican. He could have just stayed home on Election Day and force-fed the women he holds captive in the crawl space beneath his living room.

Nothing feels better than being singled out by something that at best should fear you and at worst would like to eat you.

It's beautiful, the Atlantic, but at the same time so insistent, always advancing, always taking what it wants.

If you happen to live there, it's always refreshing to view Manhattan from afar. Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.

You don't think Babyhands pressed a button he shouldn't have, do you?

Los gobiernos no pueden dar nada que no les hayan arrancado antes a sus ciudadanos.

it caused one of Douglass's most challenging psychic dilemmas. He repeatedly faced the question of how uncompromising radicalism could mix with a learned pragmatism to try to influence real power, to determine how to condemn the princes and their laws but also influence and eventually join them.

When the influence of office or any other influence shall soften my hatred of tyranny and violence do not spare me; let fall upon me the lash of your keenest and most withering censure. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1879

As he told of it over and over in public forums later, he portrayed his victory over Covey as the demonstration of the physical force necessary for male dignity and power.

In August, Douglass righteously claimed that "everyone knows that this is the slaveholders' rebellion and nothing else." The war, he said, was the work of a "privileged class of irresponsible despots, authorized tyrants and blood-suckers, who fasten upon the Negro's flesh, and draw political power and consequence from their legalized crimes.