Power Quotes

No man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.

H. L. Mencken

There is nothing in the world more powerful than an idea. No weapon can destroy it; no power can conquer it except the power of another idea.

James Roy Smith

The wise determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable, from sensibility to oppression; the high minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.

Edmund Burke

Presumption means nothing more than as stated by Lord Mansfield, the weighing of probabilities, and deciding, by the powers of common sense, on which side the truth is.

Sir William Drape

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding and that there is always tomorrow.

Dorothy Thompson

A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.

Primo Levi

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

Edmund Burke

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire...

Socrates, Quoted in: Plato, Phaedrus.

The power of one is above all things The power to believe in yourself Often well beyond any latent ability previously demonstrated. The mind is the athlete, The body is simply the means it uses.

Bryce Courtenay

The saddest failures in life are those that come from not putting forth the power and will to succeed.

Edwin Whipple

Self - Reverence, self knowledge, self - Control. These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

Lord Tennyson

If you tell the truth, you have infinite power supporting you; but if not, you have infinite power against you.

Charles Gordon

Austin Powers Yeah, baby, yeah.

Austin Powers International Man of Mystery

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptable. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse Dune, Missionaria Protectiva

This art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men.

Captain J. A. Hadfield

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest of human creature that walks.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Customs are more powerful than laws.

The Talmud

I repeat... that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that from the people, and for the people all springs, and all must exist.

Benjamin Disraeli

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

Erich Fromm

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

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you speak.

Toni Morrison, American writer (1931 -)

Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power. A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy.

Tyron Edwards

The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children. If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.

Clarence Darrow

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

What this power is, I cannot say. All I know is that it exists... and it becomes available only when you are in that state of mind in which you know EXACTLY what you want... and are fully determined not to quit until you get it.

Alexander Graham Bell

Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate their subject matters.

B. F. Skinne

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

Nelson Mandela

Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.

Henry George

Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon? laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution? these can lift at a colossal humbug? push it a little? weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, chapter 10 (1916)

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Jim

A nuclear power plant is infinently safer than eating, because 300 people choke to death on food every year.

Dixie Lee Ray

Better to rely on one powerful king than on many little princes.

Jean de La Fontaine

Beware of dissipating your powers; strive constantly to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but is sure to repent of every ill - Judged outlay.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.

Charles De Gaulle