Quotes About Power

The awful shadow of some unseen PowerFloats though unseen among us—visitingThis various world with as inconstant wingAs summer winds that creep from flower to flower.

Kings are like stars—they rise and set, they haveThe worship of the world, but no repose.

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys: Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame, A mechanised automaton.

Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number Shake your chains to earth like dew We are many, they are few

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone, And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.

The indignity of your fate is the will of one more powerful.

Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and thou Terror!

At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God's own heart?

I met Murder on the way - He had a mask like Castlereagh

Men of England, heirs of Glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Nurslings of one mighty Mother, Hopes of her, and one another; Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you- Ye are many — they are few

The person who has been accustomed to subdue men by force will be less inclined to the trouble of convincing or persuading them.

He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own;

when the power of imparting joy Is equal to the will, the human soul Requires no other heaven.

Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven, which shook, but fell not.

Yet if thou wilt, as 'tis destiny of trodden worms to writhe till they are dead, put forth thy might.

War is the statesman's game

It is better that we gain what we demand by a process of negotiation which would occupy twenty years, than that by communicating a sudden shock to the interests of those who are the depositaries and dependents of power we should incur the calamity which their revenge might inflict upon us by giving the signal of . . . war.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world":

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.

Beware, O Man - for knowledge must to thee, Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be.