Quotes About Power

Still, when your truthful eyes, your keen, attentive stare, endow the vacuous slut with royalty, when you match her soul to her shimmering hair, what can she do but rise to your imagined throne? And what can I, but see beyond the world that is, when, faithful, you insist I have the golden key-- and learn from you once more the terror and the bliss, the world as it might be?

Names have power. In certain cultures, just speaking a man's name gives you mastery over him.

Civilization culminates in the power-press. It is the grand total of the difference between a boastful United Statian and a beastly Hottentot, —between Yankee Doodle and Timbucktoodle

She thought of all the words that went unspoken in the world, throughout time: what happened to them, where did they go? What would happen if they were all spoken? How different would the world be then?

If voting changed anything they'd abolish it.

The Tories had the legal right to demand extra meetings of the council but I could decide when they would be held and always called them for Friday afternoons, knowing that three or four of the richer Tories went to the country early and were not prepared to stay in the city beyond lunchtime. I realised that nothing in politics is new when I read in Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars that Julius Caesar pulled the same trick when reactionaries in the senate were making his life difficult.

Yet despite the threats from states – including in Hungary – they remain the only institutions that can guarantee universities' autonomy. The key is in the hand of the state. It can turn it on, it can turn it off.

I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.

The Lord hadn't forgotten Elizabeth, nor had he tarried in answering her prayer without a good purpose. He chose her—an older woman with an unproven womb—in order to display his power, his might, his authority. And he blessed her to honor her faithfulness. The truth is, God's strength is fully revealed when our strength is depleted.

The loss of speech wasn't punishment; it was the proof Zechariah had asked for, the assurance of God's power.

Connecting: The Enduring Power of Female Friendship, Sandy Sheehy

To deny we need and want power is to deny that we hope to be effective.

all gods were like that: the knife behind the smile, the drop of poison in the honey jar. They liked to bind you to them, make you dance on razorblades.

But even before Obama had a chance to carve out a name for himself as a drone-happy serial killer in the Middle East, the US made it clear that it was not going to play benign hegemon in its Latin American backyard.

For a young American woman, it was all too easy to convince an inquiring stranger that the work she did was menial, or that she existed as a plaything for the men she worked for.

Some days you're Superman, some days you're Clark Kent.

We've been down the road of your hasty exits too many times, Mrs. Danvers. You married your master, and you married a sadist--of your own free will. You might remember that when you're tempted to walk out in a huff, defy my orders, and behave like a selfish brat. You got that?

Nothing is excluded and the unique nature of every aspect of creation is celebrated. This is how oneness works when it is not just a concept but a living presence. Many patterns and attachments that we think are essential to life will fall away, just as our present structures of power will become redundant. And the wonder of this change is that it need not be gradual, because it belongs to the now. Any real change is always a miracle - it happens through the grace of God.

Dealing with the impossible, fantasy can show us what may be really possible. If there is grief, there is the possibility of consolation; if hurt, the possibility of healing; and above all, the curative power of hope. If fantasy speaks to us as we are, it also speaks to us as we might be.

there is always something fundamentally wrong with a rich man or a king who pretends to be religious. Let the poor and helpless invoke the gods. That is what the gods are for—to distract the attention of the weak from their otherwise intolerable miseries. When an emperor makes much ado about religion, he is either cracked or crooked.

Evil cannot be conquered by wishing.

A crown is a pitiless master, harsher than the staff of a pig-keeper; while a staff bears up, a crown weighs down, beyond the strength of any man to wear it lightly.

A crown is more discomfort than adornment. If you have learned that, you have already learned much.

But one of the saddest, most deprecating misuses of power is the withholding of love, affirmation, and delight from other people. Few things keep people in line with our wishes more than an attitude of reserve or aloofness. It is paradoxical that in the power struggle of relationships, the one who loves and encourages the least, gains the most power. This puts people on edge, keeps them guessing, and plays on their need for assurance about their worth.