Quotes About Power

Authority, as you usually think of it, is merely the excuse the strong use to make others conform to what they want.

Lies are a little fortress; inside them you can feel safe and powerful. Through your little fortress of lies you try to run your life and manipulate others. But the fortress needs walls, so you build some. These are the justifications for your lies. You know, like you are doing this to protect someone you love, to keep them from feeling pain. Whatever works, just so you feel okay about the lies.

Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse.

It is impossible for you to take power over the future because it isn't even real.

I look at my people, and I look at those who control them - the political elite. And the sad thing is that the elites are just not interested in the welfare of the people.

In politics, sometimes you have to lie, or you make a promise that you cannot keep.

If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own.

As soon as the train pulled into the station, the red guards would pour out of doors and windows like toothpaste squirting endlessly from a tube.

This was a key moment in my life. I had always assumed that light carries farther than human voices and voices carry farther than body heat. But that night I realized it is not so, for when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what "the people" means.

What you are doing is something unprecedented in China and the world. Three hundred million peasants, one-sixth of the world's population, must liberate themselves from thirty centuries of feudal landlord domination. Smashing the landlords' economic power means smashing their political power. Only that can make secure the power of the people.

Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed....

On a warm spring day, a galloping horse was only too clearly a sweating animal of flesh and blood. But a horse racing through a snowstorm became one with the very elements; wrapped in the whirling blast of the north wind, the beast embodied the icy breath of winter.

It seemed that hell could appear day or night, at any time, at any place, simply in response to one's thoughts or wishes. It seemed that we could summon it at our pleasure and that instantly it would appear.

No one's words can compete with this mercilessly powerful rain. The only thing that can compete with the sound of this rain, that can smash this deathlike wall of sound, is the shout of a man who refuses to stoop to this chatter, the shout of a simple spirit that knows no words.

The measure of a woman's power is the degree of suffering with which she can punish her lover.

More than anything else, Kiyoaki thought, more than Princess Chan, the emerald ring, their friends, their school, perhaps what the princes had needed had been sunshine. It seemed that summer had the power to heal all frustrations, soothe every grief, restore their lost happiness.

Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too.

But then another thought occurred to me: if we grant that human passion has the power to rise above all absurdity, how can it be argued that it does not have the power to rise above the absurdities of passion itself?

The Chief always insisted it would take acts such as this to fill the world's great hollows. Though nothing else could do it, he said, murder would fill those gaping caves in much the same way that a crack along its face will fill a mirror. Then they would achieve real power over existence.

A los otros es preciso destruirlos. A todos. Para que yo pueda levantar mi rostro al sol es necesario que sea devastado el mundo entero...

Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too.

True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.

You can do whatever you want. Besides the works of the Hikaris…seem to be destined to end up with the Niwas.

Many powerful works were created by the Hikari clan. My clan. But in creating those works of art, they also created a curse. That curse plagues even me. Maybe I want to test that curse…