Quotes About Power

Who advised carrying a big stick?" President Theodore Roosevelt's motto was, "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." He meant that you should use diplomacy, but be ready to use force when necessary.

The trigger has been squeezed, the deathly mechanism has been enabled, the fatal course of a bullet has been set. No amount of bleating or praying or wailing of cajoling can halt it or stall it or call it back.

Nathan's thoughts were a giant, angry sea tap-tap-tapping on a small dyke wall.

The world lit up like a silent photograph, flat and grainy, limning the tree stark as a charcoal slash against a parchment sky. Lightning exploded like bluewhite cats-o'-nine-tails until sound rolled and cracked and splintered and Marghe could no longer tell if it was the ground shaking or her muscles; she felt deaf and blind and exposed to her core.

Fursey was now eating—and drinking, always drinking—at Mulstan's expense, not her uncle's. The gift of kings, her mother said: to make others pay.

Hild faced him influencing, because Edwin was like a dog: show fear and he would chose you down. But then she broke her gaze. To challenge an uneasy before his men was to invite death.

You're like concrete. Completely real. Even just standing there, before you said anything, you made everything else real: the walls, the floors, what he'd done to me.

Power and ambition were two edges of the same sword, as she knew herself. She wanted to be powerful so she could protect her people; she had people because she was powerful. And there were different kinds of power: the still, pent power of the seer; the free, raging power of the butcher-bird. But did there have to be only one path?

I am the light, she thought. I am not a maid. I am the light. Cold as a sword. I will show no weakness.

In my Armani suit I cut through the crowd like a hammerhead among trout.

The caterer was chatting, standing wide-legged and easy, knife moving this way and that as she talked, taking up her space a little too aggressively, the way women who have been raised with a lot of brothers tend to in a group of men. It was clear she had never considered using the knife for anything but food preparation; there was no awareness of its edge and balance as it related to the soft skin of the men around her.

She had wide shoulders, a tight waist flowing into rounded hips, and muscles on her fingers and forearms and neck. I guessed her back was also finely muscled, and her legs. It was muscle that comes from intensive training from an early age, the kind a trapeze artist or free climber or high diver develops. Not something acquired behind a food counter.

Everything the king does is a lie.

It would be so easy-my right hand on his right wrist, pull and step, left arm across his throat, whirl and spread my arms, like a dance, and he would drop spine-down over my thigh, snap: less than three seconds, start to finish-but a broken boy would help nothing.

If she's to guide kings, she'll need subtlety, and all the Anglisc know is blade and blood and boast." Hild said in Irish, "You have not met my mother.

Now he understood why her hounds spoke of her as they did: not human, more like a wall, a tide, the waxing of the moon. A force of nature. Implacable, untouchable.

Hild felt herself split in two: the butcher-bird thinking, I could take him, and the seer, I serve the king.

Sitting in the fire in the summer evening as Hild the daughter of the might-have-been king, not Hild the seer of the overking, speaking nothing but British, she felt her face setting in a new shape, happier, younger.

She raised her cup to Edwin and wondered how much longer she could help him stay king.

She would be glad not to attend Edwin. She had her father's hair, more so every day. When her uncle was thinking of power and dynasty, it was best not to come to his attention. And she had a lot to think about.

The king would never let Hild go, not now. Not until she was dead or of no more use.

They were afraid of the child. Fursey didn't know whether to pity her or be glad for her. Fear could always be used.

For one brief moment the three of them were one, and they stood against six attackers almost without effort.

Danner strode out of her offices, the adrenaline of rage surging light and hot through her veins. Rage that soon became a kind of exhilaration. She was going to do her job. At last.