Quotes About Power

Now that I knew who she was, such meekness looked absurd on her, like a great eagle trying to hunch down to fit inside a sparrow's nest.

They will resent you. Worse, they will suspect you, for you are the daughter of a sorcerer and a witch in your own right.

He is lost in Agamemnon and Odysseus' wily double meanings, their lies and games of power. They have confounded him, tied him to a stake and baited him. I stroke the soft skin of his forehead. I would untie him if I could. If he would let me.

Come, make us into magic.

Killing a whole family was something to boast of, a glorious deed that proved you powerful enough to wipe a name from the earth.

If it were a man, I wondered if I would pity him. But it was not a man. When I passed back by the pen, his friends would stare at me with pleading faces. They moaned and squealed, and pressed their snouts to the earth. We are sorry, we are sorry. Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong

they won't fear you as they fear the rest of us.

There I discovered at last the limits of my power. However potent the mixture, however well woven the spell, the toad kept trying to fly, and the mouse to sting. Transformation touched only bodies, not minds.

They do not care if you are good. They barely care if you are wicked. The only thing that makes them listen is power. It is not enough to be an uncle's favorite, to please some god in his bed. It is not enough even to be beautiful, for when you go to them, and kneel and say, 'I have been good, will you help me?' they wrinkle their brows.

Mr. Geard uncrossed his legs and purposely made his chair creak by shifting his position in it. One of the grand secrets of the man's magnetic power was that he forced himself to see nothing, to hear nothing, to think nothing of other people's affairs.

All that his tipsiness did was to make him five times more his natural self than in normal times. And Mr. Geard's natural self was a thing of mountainous potency.

It is perfectly possible for an energetic and powerfully galvanic will to win renown for its owner, while the deepest part of the personality which that towering will-power has to carry along with it, just as a swiftly driving chariot might have to carry in the belly of its body a writhing and squirming serpent, may be secretly twitching and quivering with all manner of maniacal distates and repugnances.

the mafia kills in the way a state does; it does not murder, it executes.

The camorra turned the needs and rights of their fellow prisoners (like their bread or their pizzo) into favours. Favours that had to be paid for, one way or another. The camorra system was based on the power to grant those favours and to take them away. Or even to throw them in people's faces. The real cruelty of the turnip-throwing episode is that the camorrista was bestowing a favour that he could just as easily have withheld.

Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing.

Emile, you're a goodlooking fellow and steady and you'll get on in the world. . . . But I'll never put myself in a man's power again. . . . I've suffered too much. . . . Not if you came to me with five thousand dollars.

But you just watch, little girl. I'm goin' to show 'em. In five years they'll come crawlin' to me on their bellies. I don't know what it is, but I got a kind of feel for the big money.

What good? I'll bury them back there in the court and wait. I'll need them in the end. D'you know what it'll mean, your revolution? Another system! When there's a system there are always men to be bought with diamonds. That's what the world's like." "But they won't be worth anything. It'll only be work that is worth anything." "We'll see," said the Chink.

The old Romans knew better; to keep people quiet they filled their bellies.

a nation in which the centralized power and the separate communities work only to nullify each other.

Tis Fate that flings the dice, And as she flings Of kings makes peasants, And of peasants kings.

What passion cannot music raise or quell

What cannot Praise effect in Mighty Minds, When Flattery Sooths, and when Ambition Blinds!

Ms. Babylon has thus come to see herself as God: "I shall always be here, mistress forever. . . . I and I alone am still here" (Is 47:7, 8). No superpower can ever imagine it will cease to be in power, but this means its pretension is quasi-divine and must be corrected.