Quotes About Power

I have always found the word 'Europe' in the mouths of those politicians who wanted from other powers something they did not dare to demand in their own name. Otto von Bismarck We

Sade's ultimate achievement was to make sex the choicest expression of obscene cruelty and absolute, despotic power.

panjandrums

there are just 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate for almost three hundred million people.

The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man

For one shining moment, you were the king of fear," she said.

Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.

This is the importance of the Irish problem for Marshal. It tested his capacity as not other episode of his life. He had to fend off the king with one hand & preserve his lordship in Leinster with the other. Here we find the first signs that the man had some streak of greatness in him; that he was more than a simpering courtier. In the Leinster years we discover why the Marshal came in the end to rule England.

It's a really, really scary thing to stand here, to put words in people's mouths to say to God. It's terrifying to me. You potentially could mess someone up for...I don't know, eternity.

A leafdi wes mid hire fan biset al abuten, hire lond al destruet, & heo al poure, inwið an eorðene castel.

Apocalyptic shows us what we're not seeing. It can't be composed or spoken by the powers that be, because they are the sustainers of "the way things are" whose operation justifies itself by crowning itself as "the way things ought to be" and whose greatest virtue is in being "realistic." Thinking through what we mean by "realistic" is where apocalyptic begins.

The castle, and all it represents, will always be with us. Once it was born, once the stone was made living, the repository of power made real, the idea could never be unmade. Even if all the castles of all the world were destroyed, in the minds of men they would be built anew; the wizard called imagination would raise high walls and towers out of ruins.

In the end, it is not the power of the mind nor the strengths of the body but the instincts of the human heart that save the world. It is the simple human capacity for mercy that finally allows evil to be overthrown.

Once again there shall be great music: this shall be mightier than the first. It shall be unflawed, filled with wisdom and sadness, and beautiful beyond compare

Give a member of Congress a junket and a mimeograph machine and he thinks he is secretary of state.

But if we are truly happy inside, then age brings with it a maturity, a depth, and a power that only magnifies our radiance.

Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the universe.

Good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rulers or policies without violence when they are.

The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.

mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well, for in effect they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape. Diamond

knowledge has the unique ability to take aim at a distant target and utterly transform it while having scarcely any effect on the space between.

Even a typical star converts millions of tonnes of mass into energy every second, with each gram releasing as much energy as an atom bomb.

Wars between classes might just replace one set of pigs with another, but they had some underlying point to them. Wars between nations, as far as Russell could see, had absolutely none. The

I've known a lot of political figures but never another one whose self-control seemed so fragile.