Quotes About Power

She remembers the secret from her days onstage: Mobilize your inner will. Summon all the memory of a life lived. Hold it in your head: Right and wrong. The truth, self-evident. Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

The law is simply human will, written down.

But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine.

She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power . . . ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds. To police the harmonic possibilities as if there were no limits to music's threat.

The redwoods do strange things. They hum. They radiate arcs of force. Their burls spill out in enchanted shapes.

Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine. "Well," the man on the ground says, "I'm sticking it to the old bastard now!

The tens of thousands of fans posting to online forums have more control over what happens next than any of the upper brass.

Independent thought—a power of attraction all its own.

auto-suggestion.

When she speaks again, the softness shatters him. "I never knew how strong a drug other people are." "The strongest. Or at least the most widely abused." "How long does it take to . . . detox?" He considers. "Nobody's ever clean.

People have no corner on curious behavior. Other creatures—bigger, slower, older, more durable—call the shots, make the weather, feed creation, and create the very air.

Life is a battle between the Maker and His creation.

Trouble, like the atmosphere, flows everywhere, in currents beyond the power of humans to predict or control.

But there is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.

Humankind is a thug. The law is a goon.

It's what his muscles know, especially that largest muscle in his inventory—his soul.

Tecumseh tried to unite the scattered nations under the banner of Crane Power, but the Hopi mark for the crane's foot became the world's peace symbol.

We're living in the age of mass hypnotism. As long as we keep clapping our hands and believing, the captains of industry will take care of us.

Food is also the stuff of international politics, and the power of one country to control the daily bread of another has always been politically important.

As geographic place lost its power to guarantee quality, modern corporate brands began to appear, at first linked to the personal names of the manufacturers, who thereby offered their reputation, their face as it were, to establish a bond of trust with consumers.

Then everyone began to wonder why he didn't shut the pile off," Anderson continues. 1701 "But Fermi was completely calm. He waited another minute, then another, and then when it seemed that the anxiety was too much to bear, he ordered 'ZIP in!' " It was 3: 53 P.M. Fermi had run the pile for 4.5 minutes at one-half watt and brought to fruition all the years of discovery and experiment. Men had controlled the release of energy from the atomic nucleus.

How much the world lost that September is immeasurable. The complementarity of the bomb, its mingled promise and threat, would not be canceled by the decisions of heads of state; their frail authority extends not nearly so far. Nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion are not acts of Parliament; they are levers embedded deeply in the physical world, discovered because it was possible to discover them, beyond the power of men to patent or to hoard.