Quotes About Power

When the Lord Chancellor violates the trust of his great office of state to solicit party donations from people whose careers he can control, and then says I'm not sorry, and I'd do it again no wonder the public think that power has gone to their heads.

The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, the sun of their microcosm, that upon which all growth depends, from which all power proceeds.

Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.

Grace in women has more effect than beauty.

The incentive to ambition is the love of power.

One has no notion of him [William Cobbett] as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns readers…. He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; "lays waste" a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the government itself. He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.

The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously; and those who have produced immortal works, have done so without knowing how or why. The greatest power operates unseen.

Those who can command themselves command others.

To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.

Shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of my mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom, with power, because I have been followed with one cry of abuse ever since for not being a Government tool?

Words are the only things that last forever; they are more durable than the eternal hills

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

Persons without education certainly do not want [lack] either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction--they see their objects always near, never in the horizon.

Thus, to give an obvious instance, if I have once enjoyed the cool shade of a tree, and been lulled into a deep repose by the sound of a brook running at its feet, I am sure that wherever I can find a tree and a brook, I can enjoy the same pleasure again. Hence, when I imagine these objects, I can easily form a mystic personification of the friendly power that inhabits them, Dryad or Naiad, offering its cool fountain or its tempting shade. Hence the origin of the Grecian mythology.

We admit of no government by divine right… the only legitimate right to govern is an express grant of power from the governed.

Far different is the power of our sovereignty. It can interfere with no one's faith, prescribe forms of worship for no one's observance, inflict no punishment but after well-ascertained guilt, the result of investigation under rules prescribed by the Constitution itself.

The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators.

There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.

The only legitimate right to govern is an express grant of power from the governed.

Young Hamilton was even then coming into his own as the most energetic and brilliant of the nationalists, with a strong interest in the connections between national finance and national military power.

You will never face an evil you have not the strength to master.

The President can exercise no power which cannot be fairly and reasonably traced to some specific grant of power in the Federal Constitution or in an act of Congress passed in pursuance thereof. There is no undefined residuum of power which he can exercise because it seems to him to be in the public interest.

If they will play fair I will play fair, but if they won't then I reserve all my rights to do anything I find myself able to do.

I would like to have an ample fund to spread the light of Republicanism, but I am willing to undergo the disadvantage to make certain that in the future we shall reduce the power of money in politics for unworthy purposes.