Quotes About Power

In times of war, the law falls silent. Silent enim leges inter arma

Politicians are not born; they are excreted.

God, if she considered it, seemed awfully cruel and violent, blowing people's houses down, washing out the coastline. Such a God, Allison was sure, would have to be a man, and not a particularly nice one.

There is more than one kind of freedom... Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

"Why do men feel threatened by women?" I asked a male friend of mine.... "They're afraid women will laugh at them," he said.... Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, "Why do women feel threatened by men?" "They're afraid of being killed," they said.

In an age that persecutes deviants, you can yet lose your life for being the possessor of a dangerous or unacceptable story. Words are powerful, which means that words can also be fatal.

Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.

What is needed for really good tyranny is an unquestionable idea or authority. Political disagreement is political disagreement. But political disagreement with a theocracy is heresy.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

Like water leaking slowly through a dike to become a steady trickle or a flood, words and ideas inexorably elude the censor's grasp. (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)

Women's Tongues are as sharp as two-edged Swords, and wound as much, when they are anger'd.

that much gold, and great store of riches makes them mad, insomuch as they endeavour to destroy each other...

At which the Emperor rejoycing, made her his Wife, and gave her an absolute power to rule and govern all that World as she pleased.

for, I am not Covetous, but as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; which is the cause, That though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own.

fear and wonder makes gods.

George Bush isn't Hitler. He could be if he applied himself.

She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history.

But all through the evening every time I looked at him I'd find his blue eyes fixed on me, with that naked look one can't help recognizing, and can't help remembering either that one has a certain power and occasionally men are vulnerable to it, and sometimes one ends up hurting them. But when it's happening it all seems worth it, and in the end too: however it ends I think, as far as I can tell so far, it still stays worth it.

I don't like taking from anyone. I'd rather be a giver, though not for any worthy reason. It's about control, obviously. If I give, I control; if I take, I am controlled. If someone offers me something for free I am at once suspicious.

The strong look for more strength, the weak for excuses.