Quotes About Power

Occasional mistakes are inevitable—the world is just too unpredictable. People of power, however, are undone not by the mistakes they make, but by the way they deal with them.

An understanding of people's hidden motives is the single greatest piece of knowledge you can have in acquiring power.

Remake yourself into a character of power. Working on yourself like clay should be one of your greatest and most pleasurable life tasks. It makes you in essence an artist—an artist creating yourself.

He increasingly spoke of himself in the third person, as if he had become an impersonal revolutionary force, and as such he was infallible. If he happened to mispronounce a word in a speech, every subsequent speaker from then on would have to pronounce it that way. "If I'd said it right," confessed one of his top lieutenants, "Stalin would have felt I was correcting him." And that could prove suicidal.

No power is made available by ignoring images and symbols. There is no possible reversal to this law.

On the other hand, an attack on another man's reputation is a potent weapon, particularly when you have less power than he does.

entre más se relaje el objetivo, más fácil te será inclinarlo a tu voluntad.

Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense. Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelop them in enough smoke, and by the time they realize your intentions, it will be too late.

These childhood attractions are hard to put into words and are more like sensations—that of deep wonder, sensual pleasure, power, and heightened awareness.

Los débiles siempre se benefician con las luchas entre los poderosos".

In searching, as you must, for the methods that will gain you the most power for the least effort, you will find the creation of a cultlike following one of the most effective.

People feel superior to the person whose actions they can predict. If you show them who is in control by playing against their expectations, you both gain their respect and tighten your hold on their fleeting attention.

If you yearn for power, quickly lay honesty aside, and train yourself in the art of concealing your intentions.

By being unabashedly open you make yourself so predictable and familiar that it is almost impossible to respect or fear you, and power will not accrue to a person who cannot inspire such emotions.

Sacrifice is a ritual, perhaps the most ancient ritual of all; ritual too is a well-spring of power.

The power of demonstrating your idea is that your opponents do not get defensive, and are therefore more open to persuasion.

Robert Greene

All working situations require a kind of distance between people. You are trying to work, not make friends; friendliness (real or false) only obscures that fact. The key to power, then, is the ability to judge who is best able to further your interests in all situations. Keep friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent.

When you hold yourself back, you incur not anger but a kind of respect. You instantly seem powerful because you make yourself un-graspable, rather than succumbing to the group, or to the relationship, as most people do. As your reputation for independence grows, more and more people will come to desire you, wanting to be the one who gets you to commit. The moment you commit, the magic is gone. You become like everyone else. People will try all kinds of underhanded methods to get you to commit.

Playing with appearances and mastering arts of deception are among the aesthetic pleasures of life. They are also key components in the acquisition of power.

Julius Caesar was perhaps the first public figure to understand the vital link between power and theater.

Rather than flattering Louis XIV, Fouquet's elaborate party offended the king's vanity. Louis would not admit this to anyone, of course—instead, he found a convenient excuse to rid himself of a man who had inadvertently made him feel insecure. Such is the fate, in some form or other, of all those who unbalance the master's sense of self, poke holes in his vanity, or make him doubt his pre-eminence.

la esencia de la coqueta no radica en el señuelo y la tentación, sino en la posterior marcha atrás, la reticencia emocional. Ésta es la clave del deseo esclavizador.

Caesar set the ideal for all leaders and people of power. Like him, you must learn to enlarge your actions through dramatic techniques such as surprise