Quotes About Power

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that you use it so little.

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity we use it so little.

Using fear to build political capital is a tactic as old as politics.

Money is a country all its own.

I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

You asked me earlier,' she said to me, 'whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don't have the answer to that,' she said, 'but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.

Benim aç?mdan, kad?nlarla erkeklerin öyküsü, son tahlilde bir savaÅŸ öyküsüdür.

You asked me earlier,' she said to me, 'whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don't have the answer to that,' she said, 'but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.

I remember always being frightened that one day she would eat me

I told her she would always be able to find a white man to be obliterated by, if that was what she decided she wanted.

My husband Tony sometimes says to me that I underestimate my own power, and I wonder whether that makes living more hazardous for me than for other people, the way it's dangerous for those who lack the ability to feel pain.

Whatever power it is that I have, it's nothing compared to the power of stupidity. That was and remains my reasoning, even though I could have taken the opportunity to live an idyll here of easeful impotence.

So much power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you.

What was soothing, he believed, was the very fact that this oceanic chorus was affixed in no one person, that it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere: he recognised that a lot of people found this idea maddening, but for him the erosion of individuality was also the erosion of the power to hurt.

Only tyrants want power for its own sake, and parenthood is the closest most people get to an opportunity for tyranny. Was I a tyrant, wielding shapeless power without authority? What I felt a lot of the time was a sort of stage fright, the way I imagine inexperienced teachers must feel when they stand at the front of the class looking at a sea of expectant faces.

He had grown more animated while he spoke, and his desperate, wild-eyed demeanour had softened into the genial mask of the raconteur. I had the impression that these were stories he had told before and liked to tell, as though he had discovered the power and pleasure of reliving events with their sting removed. The skill, I saw, lay in skirting close enough to what appeared to be the truth without allowing what you actually felt about it to regain its power over you.

Ele não olhou para mim nem sequer uma vez, pois os momentos em que as pessoas estão demonstrando o próprio poder sobre as outras são aqueles em que têm menos consciência delas.

I had the impression that these were stories he had told before and liked to tell, as though he had discovered the power and pleasure of reliving events with their sting removed. The skill, I saw, lay in skirting close enough to what appeared to be the truth without allowing what you actually felt about it to regain its power over you.

So much of power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you.

But for once I thought, let someone else do it! And that is how we lose control over our own destinies.

Cruelty is an aspect of civilisation, I say. Cruelty is part of power; it's like the army; you bring it out when you need to. … What he calls cruelty I call the discipline of self-criticism. A woman who loves herself is unprotected. She will be invaded, put in chains, left there in the primordial swamp to love her heart out.

She had sat there, she said, and thought about her own lifelong habit of explaining herself, and she thought about this power of silence, which put people out of one another's reach.

Love is more respectable, more practical, more hardworking than I had ever suspected, but it lies close to the power to destroy. I have never before remotely felt myself to possess that power, and I am as haunted by it as if it were a gun in a nearby drawer.