Power Quotes

Most powerful is he who has himself in his power.

Seneca

Knowing others is intelligence knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power.

Lao Tzu

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

Eric Hoffe

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

With great power comes great responsibility.

Stan Lee, Spider - Man comic

To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.

William Hazlitt, on the Pleasure of Hating

So they the Government go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all - Powerful to be impotent.

Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 12, 1936

Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, President of Yale University

Anger without power is folly.

German Prove

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.

Hannah Arendt

The joy of a spirit is the measure of its power.

Ninon de Lenclos

When a man feels throbbing within him the power to do what he undertakes as well as it can possibly be done, and all of his faculties say amen to what he is doing, and give their unqualified approval to his efforts, - This is happiness, this is success.

Orison Swett Marden

Hope is the companion of power, and mother of success; for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles.

Samuel Smiles

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Henry Kissinge

The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.

William Henry Harrison

As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow - Citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.

Tench Coxe

Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in the power of your hand to do so.

Proverbs 3: 27

If you knew what I know about the power of giving, you would not let a single meal pass without sharing it in some way.

Buddha

Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid.

Ronal Reagan, 20 March 1981

It is easier to talk about money - - And much easier to talk about sex - - Than it is to talk about power. People who have it deny it people who want it do not want to appear to hunger for it and people who engage in its machinations do so secretly.

Smiley Blanton

The American male at the peak of his physical powers and appetites, driving 160 big white horses across the scenes of an increasingly open society, with weekend money in his pocket and with little prior exposure to trouble and tragedy, personifies an accident going to happen.

John Sloan Dickey

As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.

Albert Einstein

Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for beingWhy thou wert there, O rival of the roseI never sought to ask, I never knewBut, in my simple ignorance supposeThe selfsame power that brought me there brought you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Choice is an illusion, created between those with power, and those without.

Wachowski Brothers, The Matrix Reloaded

We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.

Charles Horton Cooley

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.

Stewart L. Udall, commencement address, Dartmouth College, June 13, 1965

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.

John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy, 1981 - 1987

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, then the world will know peace.

Jimi Hendrix

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

Doctor Who

Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.

Elie Wiesel

Women have served all these centuries as looking - Glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.

Virginia Woolf

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

Epictetus

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.

John Adams

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

Immanuel Kant, CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

Creative power, is that receptive attitude of expectancy which makes a mold into which the plastic and as yet undifferentiated substance can flow and take the desired form.

Thomas Troward

The secret of all power is - Save your force. If you want high pressure you must choke off waste.

Joseph Farrell