quotations about power
You have seen power in its various forms--a benign deity, when exercised in the suppression of fraud, injustice, and tyranny, but a demon, when united with unbounded ambition--a wide-wasting fury, who has destroyed her thousands. Not an age of the world but has produced characters, to which whole human hecatombs have been sacrificed.
ABIGAIL ADAMS
letter to John Quincy Adams, December 26, 1783
Power needs ideas and legitimation the way a conventional bank needs investment policies and the confidence of its depositors. Rulers are always few in number and could never obtain compliance if each command were purely random and had to be backed by force sufficient to compel obedience. Likewise, banks rely on the confidence of their depositors, which allows them to retain only a small fraction of their assets in liquid funds in order to meet the expected rate of withdrawal by depositors. All is well as long as depositors believe that the bank will cash their checks on demand, and part of that trust depends on a vague knowledge about the bank's adherence to certain accepted business standards. In the nation-state, all is well as long as citizens believe that the government knows what it is about, has the ability to deliver on some of its promises, and has sufficient force to back up its commands when necessary.... Legitimation achieves what power alone cannot, for it establishes the belief in the rightness of rule which, as long as it endures, precludes massive challenges.
REINHARD BENDIX
Kings or People
Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.
WOODROW WILSON
letter to Mary A. Hulbert, September 21, 1913
The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.
TOBIAS WOLFF
This Boy's Life
Power is just using energy in a wise way to get things done. Power has been misinterpreted to mean getting my way on the backs of other people. Getting whatever I want, forgetting that there are other beings and species and energies involved.
ELIZABETH LESSER
"What's Possible: An Interview With Elizabeth Lesser", Omega, May 8, 2012
But whatever gives power is also potentially dangerous. What can make others anxious is a potentially destructive power; and if it can harm others it might also destroy its owner.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Symbolic Wounds
Dim with the mist of years, gray flits the shade of power.
LORD BYRON
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Beware of the man who rises to power
From one suspender.
EDGAR LEE MASTERS
"John Hancock Otis", Spoon River Anthology
Power -- the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations -- was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.... Was this phenomenon ... the reason why such men, who were truly concerned with the workings of power, chose to stay away from its center, so that they might never lose sight of power's contours?
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Neverÿon
Never doubt what small men will do for great power.
PAOLO BACIGALUPI
The Windup Girl
Power? It's like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.
HAROLD MACMILLAN
attributed, The New Anatomy of Britain
Power, like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation. To acquire it, appears not more difficult than to be dispossessed of it when acquired, since it enables the holder to shift his own errors on dependents, and to take their merits to himself. But the miracle of losing it vanishes, when we reflect that we are as liable to fall as to rise, by the treachery of others; and that to say "I am" is language that has been appropriated exclusively to God!
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
What Desires Are Politically Important?
power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
The History of Sexuality
People at the top do not want to share their power. They've always got some marvellous reason: I'm following my religion; I'm following the laws of economics. Even Stalin: I'm representing the vanguard of the working class, so please don't cause trouble. That is the battle that every generation has, and yet we mustn't be pessimistic about it.
TONY BENN
interview, "Hope is the Key", Share International, January 2003
The natural destiny of power is fragmentation.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
The supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous character.
JAMES FRAZER
The Golden Bough
Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.
EURIPIDES
The Bacchæ
Give me power but for a single day, and it is mine forever.
SEMIRAMIS
attributed, Day's Collacon