Quotes on Power

The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.

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

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same.

Thousands of people have talent. I might as well congratulate you for having eyes in your head. The one and only thing that counts is: Do you have staying power?

Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.

Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.

Do the thing and you will have the power.

I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.

Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.

Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.