Quotes About Power

Confronted with people who have power, and who enjoy using it, I turn into a different person, a baser and meaner one.

Basker possesses three kinds of bite: a snap, a nip, and then something like a buzz saw and an angle grinder mounted on a bear trap.

These are but two, telling examples of the sad priorities in Australian affairs. The leaders entrusted to protect the country's place in the world are the same people who have to protect their own positions in power. High policy must compete for time and attention with low politics, as well as domestic policy. The big matters are commonly crowded out by the small. International policy is used for domestic point-scoring.

Antisemitism became institutionalized in elite and conservative society rather than in laws.

join the Nazi Party and try to influence it from within, "you reckon that you can still have a say in things. . . . [But] he who enters this tumbling avalanche only increases the plunging mass.

The factor that made him so powerful was also his greatest liability.

By virtue of its unbounded aggression, Roman imperialism was ultimately responsible for its own destruction.

Foreign policy often involved nothing more than the decision whom to make war upon.

One answer to the transitory nature of imperial rule, in short, is that there is a Newtonian third law of empires. The exercise of imperial power generates an opposite and equal reaction among those affected by it, until they so reorganize themselves as to blunt the imperial edge.

Having sliced Odovacar in half in early spring 493, Theoderic ruled his Italian kingdom for the next thirty-three years, until his own death on 30 August 526.

History has all too often been guilty of favouring the viewpoint of autocratic rulers in describing their glorious victories, when there is so much else that needs to be said.

Took the end of the world to make us kings for a day.

The albatross hit the top and canted her soft belly to the storm, and made a screaming banked peel-out downwind and over the other side. I don't know if anyone else on the ship saw her. To me, she was a visitation. Not harbinger or annunciation, but a simple reminder of a wold that worked, that was at home with itself and friends with storm.

Human beings, by orders of magnitude, remained the most vicious animal on the planet.

They buried their faces between the cobbles in inches of water and they felt a wind like some demonic thing, like nothing on earth, a searing gust that pummeled the canoe, they could hear the burning wood flail against it, the tick of embers, they were lying in the water heads down in the ice runnels between stones and could not help but hear the passing over of hell.

The way things ought to be. A turning of seasons and a natural acceptance of life pulling back and many things passing. There was a kind of relief in that, and a sharp beauty. Whose power had much to do with one's ability to hold the losses it augured.

The history of China, like the history of any great culture, was written at the expense of other stories that have remained silent.

Akhenaten's kingship provides an unintended caricature of all modern leaders who indulge in the trappings of charismatic display.

Women, every powerful man is becoming weak until he dies. Men, every beautiful woman is becoming less beautiful until she dies. Yet there is a deeper beauty and a deeper power and a deeper love.

Satan loves to name you, because names catch people, control people, and shape people. This world love[s] to name us. We're susceptible to names because [we believe] we're orphaned and widowed--we're so desperate, we believe them. But the one we let name us is our idol...our god our father and groom.

Jesus said, "Whatever you [all] ask in my name, I'll do it for you" (John 14:13). In my name--and who is He? He's the Plot--the Word of the Author, who is the narrator.

By...handing children the fruit of the tree of knowledge unmediated by adult wisdom, we have abandoned our young to powers and influences which we cannot control, and whose strength we do not know. To leave a child unsupervised in front of a television set is no less dangerous than giving it neat gin, or putting it within reach of narcotics.

Only one reliable force stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. Only one reliable force forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. Only one reliable force restrains the hand of the man of power. And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.

the balance of power between the sexes had been destabilized, and relations between mothers and their children transformed from a natural and accepted one to a mere option.