Quotes About Power

No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.

Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.

The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or the breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.

The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

I carry a gun cause a cop is too heavy.

We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't a man. The bank isn't like a man. Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

And now submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.

And the girl,' Lanser continued, 'the girl, Lieutenant, you may rape her, or protect her, or marry her--that is of no importance so long as you shoot her when it is ordered.

And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, Use it well, use it wisely.

When you're huntin' somepin you're a hunter, an' you're strong. Can't nobody beat a hunter. But when you get hunted - that's different. Somepin happens to you. You ain't strong: maybe you're fierce, but you ain't strong. - Muley

They know that ten heads lopped off will destroy them, but we are a free people; we have as many heads as we have people, and in a time of need leaders pop up among us like mushrooms.

That is a great mystery," said Doctor Winter. "That is a mystery that has disturbed rulers all over the world—how the people know. It disturbs the invaders now, I am told, how news runs through censorships, how the truth of things fights free of control. It is a great mystery.

Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels. They gathered mountains and valleys, rivers and whole horizons, the way a man might now gain tittle to building lots.

In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind--but he must get there first.

By whipping himself he protected himself against whipping by someone else.

Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here 'I lost my land' is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--'We lost *our* land.

It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

Perhaps it is so with everyone, that he looks for weakness in the strong to find promise of strength in his weakness.

You can only fight Fate so far, and when you give in to it you're very strong; because all of your force flows in one direction.

Consider the blundering anarchic system of the United States the stupidity of some of its lawmakers, the violent reaction, the slowness of its ability to change. Twenty-five key men destroyed could make the Soviet Union stagger, but we could lose our congress, our president, and our general staff and nothing much would have happened. We would go right on. In fact we might be better for it.

Well, you keep your place then, nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain't even funny." Crooks had reduced himself to nothing. There was no personality, no ego—nothing to arouse either like or dislike. He said, "Yes, ma'am," and his voice was toneless.

I don't know where being a servant came into disrepute. It is the refuge of a philosopher, the food of the lazy, and, properly carried out, it is a position of power, even of love.

The ancients placed love and war in the hands of closely related gods.

Sometimes it seems that the leaders of nations are little boys with chips on their shoulders, daring each other to knock them off.