Quotes About Power

And yet the wise are of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and melancholy multitude.

Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present, where its elders are so obviously powerful, and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that power.

King, whether you did right or wrong in this Let the King say, for all that I need say Is that there's nothing that cries out for death In the withholding of that ancient right

and I heard a thing coming flop-flop up the stairs like an eel, and squealing. It went to all the doors. It could not get in where I was. I would have sent it through the universe like a flash of fire. There

Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again, The beggars have changed places but the lash goes on.

He suffers with man as some firm-souled man suffers with the woman he but loves the better because she is extravagant and fickle. His descending power is neither the winding nor the straight line but zigzag, illuminating the passive and active properties, the tree's two sorts of fruit: it is the sudden lightning, for all his acts of power are instantaneous.

The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?

The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?

All I have is a voice.

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State and no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.

The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.

Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over. from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton

Small tyrants, threatened by big, sincerely believe they love liberty.

For poetry makes nothing happen.

He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Our hunting fathers told the story Of the sadness of the creatures, Pitied the limits and the lack Set in their finished features; Saw in the lion's intolerant look, Behind the quarry's dying glare, Love raging for, the personal glory That reason's gift would add, The liberal appetite and power, The rightness of a god. ...

Shoeless Joe became a symbol of the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless. The name Kenesaw Mountain Landis became synonymous with the Devil.

I mean to rule the earth, As he the sky — We really know our worth, The sun and I

I know how words are, how they go everywhere, one hint is enough. They talk of love, what do they know? We have the morsel and the knife.