Power Quotes

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.

Vaclav Havel

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

Albert Einstein

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 will to believe is perhaps the most powerful, but certainly the most dangerous human attribute.

John P. Grie

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.

William Wordsworth

To deny we need and want power is to deny that we hope to be effective.

Liz Smith

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.

Ovid

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

Once, power was considered a masculine attribute. In fact, power has no sex.

Katharine Graham

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, 1954

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

George Bernard Shaw

To conquer others is to have power, to conquer yourself is to know the way.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

The greatest power is often simple patience.

E. Joseph Crossman

Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid.

William Hazlitt, on the Pleasure of Hating

He is free knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide.

Salvador De Madriaga

Anger without power is folly.

German Prove

The devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape.

William Shakespeare

This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.

Agathon, from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

The leader who exercises power with honor will work from the inside out, starting with himself.

Blaine Lee

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.

Jim

No one that ever lived has ever had enough power, prestige, or knowledge to overcome the basic condition of all life - You win some and you lose some.

Ken Keyes

Every instance of heartbreak can teach us powerful lessons about creating the kind of love we really want.

Martha Beck, O Magazine, February 2003

I want to talk to these people because they stay in power and you change all the time.

Nikita Khrushchev

Never underestimate the power of the irate customer.

Joel E. Ross

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

Bertrand Russell

Those who have the command of the arms in a country are masters of the state, and have it in their power to make what revolutions they please. Thus, there is no end to observations on the difference between the measures likely to be pursued by a minister backed by a standing army, and those of a court awed by the fear of an armed people.

Aristotle

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.

Leonardo da Vinci

God, I offer myself to Thee, to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy power, Thy love and Thy way of life. May I do Thy will always. Amen.

Alcoholics Anonymous Praye

In men of the highest character and noblest genius there is to be found an insatiable desire for honour, command, power, and glory.

Cicero

In critical moments even the very powerful have need of the weakest.

Aesop

He who fears something gives it power over him.

Moorish Prove

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

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.

Lord Macaulay

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Edmund Burke, "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful", 1756

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it? s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

David Brin, on power and corruption

I regret to say that we of the F. B. I. are powerless to act in cases of oral - Genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.

J. Edgar Hoove

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

Epictetus