Quotes About Power

Power," said Henry Adams, "is poison"; and it is a poison which blinds the eyes of moral insight and lames the will of moral purpose. The

Philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.

The highest type of leadership maintains itself by its intrinsic worth, sans panoply, pomp and power. Of course, there are never enough real leaders to go around. Wherefore it becomes necessary to dress some men up and by other artificial means to give them a prestige and a power which they could not win by their own resources.

Power," he wrote, "always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.

Men will not cease to be dishonest, merely because their dishonesties have been revealed or because they have discovered their own deceptions. Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use whatever means are most convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise.

Teachers of morals who do not see the difference between the problem of charity within the limits of an accepted social system and the problem of justice between economic groups, holding uneven power within modern industrial society, have simply not faced the most obvious differences between the morals of groups and those of individuals.

that the failure of governments is due to the pressure of economic interest upon them rather than to the "limited capacities of human wisdom.

It is the nature of a business community that it deals with the covert forms of power in economic life and to be insensible to the significance and the complexity of more overt forms of power, even as it is insensible to the motive of the lust for power as an element in human nature.

Men will not cease to be dishonest, merely because their dishonesties have been revealed or because they have discovered their own deceptions. Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it.

the mastery of historical destiny is a tortuous process in which powerful forces may be beguiled, deflected, and transmuted but never simply annulled or defied.

If superior abilities and services to society deserve special rewards it may be regarded as axiomatic that the rewards are always higher than the services warrant. No impartial society determines the rewards. The men of power who control society grant these perquisites to themselves.

comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable

Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.

Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.

When economic power desires to be left alone it uses the philosophy of laissez faire to discourage political restraint upon economic freedom. When it wants to make use of the police power of the state to subdue rebellions and discontent in the ranks of its helots, it justifies the use of political coercion and the resulting suppression of liberties by insisting that peace is more precious than freedom and that its only desire is social peace.

To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

I have depeloped a substance which allows me to command time at my discretion.

I will even be able to free it from the power of gravity which attracts it to the future and to make it go back into the past.

They do everything in their power to make fortune favor them in this life, but nevertheless they think so little of it, in relation to eternity, that they view the events of the world as we do those of a play.

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.

I believe in the magic and authority of words.

I believe in the magic and in the authority of words

Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.