Quotes About Power

God grant to all of us the power and strength to be people of integrity, and the insight and wisdom to avoid being led into the snares of the dishonest.

What did Jesus say to you? Thomas said to them: If I tell you one of the words which he said to me, you will take up stones (and) throw them at me; and a fire will come out of the stones (and) burn you up. [Gospel of Thomas - 13]

In truth, fear is the power [of darkness]. So if you are afraid of what is about to come upon you, it will overwhelm you, and not one among them will spare you or show you mercy.

The child of humankind48 greeted them and said to them, "A seed from a power was deficient, and it descended to the earth's abyss. The majesty remembered [it] and sent the [word to] it. The word brought the seed up into [the presence] of the majesty, so that [136] the first word might not be lost."49

Since she did not know the truth, she assumed a fashioned figure and prepared, with power and in beauty, a substitute for truth.

The Bible teaches that all authority rightfully belongs to God. Any legitimate authority people wield is delegated to them by God, and they must answer to Him for the way they use it. Authority is not to be used for personal gain. It's not about displaying personal power. It's about obediently serving the God who assigned you to serve in such a position—the very attitude demonstrated by Christ Himself.

Her checkbook catches his eye. He takes it and hides it in the back of the freezer, underneath a bag of frozen lima beans. If she can freeze his account, he can freeze hers.

it is (often) the quiet gesture which carries the most significance - the one which suddenly directs the symphony.

The superiority of spiritual power over sensuous is the central point of Christian Science.

Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled.

I do wonder if, in some places, the presence of large numbers of women in parliament means that parliament is where the power is not.

You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently. It means decoupling it from public prestige. It means thinking collaboratively, about the power of followers not just of leaders. It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb ('to power'), not as a possession.

But my basic premise is that our mental, cultural template for a powerful person remains resolutely male. If we close our eyes and try to conjure up the image of a president or – to move into the knowledge economy – a professor, what most of us see is not a woman.

Whichever side won, as Cicero again observed, the result was set to be much the same: slavery for Rome. What came to be seen as a war between liberty and one-man rule was really a war to choose between rival emperors.

the empire created the emperors – not the other way round.

what recently nurtured the tyranny was nothing other than our inaction … Weakened by the pleasure of peace we learned to live like slaves

first recorded example of a man telling a woman to 'shut up';

Sallust was particularly eloquent on the theme. In his other surviving essay, on a war against the North African king Jugurtha at the end of the second century BCE, he reflects on the dire consequences of the destruction of Carthage: from the greed of all sections of Roman society ('every man for himself'), through the breakdown of consensus between rich and poor, to the concentration of power in the hands of a very few men. These all pointed to the end of the Republican system.

How have we learned to look at those women who exercise power, or who try to? What are the cultural underpinnings of misogyny in politics or the workplace, and its forms (what kind of misogyny, aimed at what or whom, using what words or images, and with what effects)? How and why do the conventional definitions of 'power' (or for that matter of 'knowledge', 'expertise' and 'authority') that we carry round in our heads exclude women?

What I have in mind is the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously, together as much as individually. It is power in that sense that many women feel they don't have – and that they want.

There is little point in asking how 'democratic' the politics of Republican Rome were: Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy.

Two central tenets of Republican government were that office holding should always be temporary and that, except in emergencies when one man might need to take control for a short while, power should always be shared.

to become a man (or at least an elite man) was to claim the right to speak.

we should be thinking more about the fault-lines and fractures that underlie dominant male discourse.