Power

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Power is a term which can refer to vital or incidental social or political power, the ability to influence or control people, circumstances or events, including the economic power to specifically influence systems of finances, currency, production and services, or the military power derived from these. In the physical sciences power represents the rate at which work is performed or energy is transferred, used, or transformed.

Quotes[edit]

  • Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
  • What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. However, and this is the supreme irony of it all, never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector.
  • He hath no power that hath not power to use.
  • Men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power.
  • The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
  • If you want to discover just what there is in a man — give him power.
    • Francis Trevelyan Miller (1910), Portrait Life of Lincoln: Life of Abraham Lincoln, the Greatest American
  • A right, in the abstract, is a fact; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never.
  • Power expands through the distribution of secrecy.
    • David John Moore Cornwell (John le Carré) (b. 1931), British author and one time spy, interviewed by Pip Ayers in Live magazine, The Mail on (10 July 2011)
  • It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery.
    • Demosthenes, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 455
  • What elements of power we wield! Truth unmixed with error, flashing as God's own lightning in its brightness, resistless if properly wielded, as that living flame! O what agencies! The Holy Ghost standing and pleading with us to so work that He may help us, the very earth coming to the help of the Lord Jesus Christ. And yet I am painfully impressed that we are not wielding the elements of Christian achievement nearly up to their maximum.
    • T. M. Eddy, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 455
  • Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force.
    • Ralph Waldo Emerson, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 456
  • Then, everlasting Love, restrain thy will;
    'Tis god-like to have power, but not to kill.
    • John Fletcher, The Chances (c. 1613–25; 1647), Act II, scene 2. Song
  • One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: 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.
  • Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.
  • One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.
  • The analysis [of power] should not attempt to consider power from its internal point of view and...should refrain from posing the labyrinthine and unanswerable question: 'Who then has power and what has he in mind? What is the aim of someone who possesses power?' Instead, it is a case of studying power at the point where its intention, if it has one, is completely invested in its real and effective practices.
  • Let us ask...how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc....we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.
  • Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere.
    • Michel Foucault, quoted in Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History : From World War II to the Present Day (2001) edited by Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon
  • The impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.
    • Eric Hoffer, in The Ordeal of Change (1963), Ch. 15 : The Unnaturalness Of Human Nature
  • The best education will not immunize a person against corruption by power. The best education does not automatically make people compassionate. We know this more clearly than any preceding generation. Our time has seen the best-educated society, situated in the heart of the most civilized part of the world, give birth to the most murderously vengeful government in history.
    Forty years ago the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought it self-evident that you would get a good government if you took power out of the hands of the acquisitive and gave it to the learned and the cultivated. At present, a child in kindergarten knows better than that.
  • Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
    • Carl Jung, in The Psychology of the Unconscious (1943)
  • Every Communist must grasp the truth: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
  • There is no surer mark of a low and unregenerate nature than this tendency of power to loudness and wantonness instead of quietness and reverence. To souls baptized in Christian nobleness the largest sphere of command is but a wider empire of obedience, calling them, not to escape from holy rule, but to its full impersonation.
    • James Martineau, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 456
  • Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
  • Nonviolent action involves opposing the opponent's power, including his police & military capacity, not with the weapons chosen by him but by quite different means...Repression by the opponent is used against his own power position in a kind of political "ju-jitsu" and the very sources of his power thus reduced or removed, with the result that his political and military position is seriously weakened or destroyed.
  • If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
  • All power corrupts, absolute power is even more fun.
  • Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
    • Ed Tufte, Wired, issue 11:09 (September 2003)
  • Power only has meaning if it's put into action, it defines you, power like that is what rules the world. Everyone seeks power, seeks to grow in strength, but this goal is out of reach of ordinary men. The poor seek riches, the ugly, beauty. We compare ourselves to others, sheltering our own inadequacies to find peace of mind. The mere existence of those who are better than us becomes intolerable, we fight in retaliation. If beauty is not enough, we'll use money. If money does not work, we resort to violence. This energy powers our world, it is essential! All I seek, is to move this natural process along. This destructive force begotten from conflict, this power that everyone must have, I will spread it across the world with but a touch. It is like a well that can never run dry. A precious mineral, flowing from an inexhaustable mine!...This power will be mine
    • Seth, Street Fighter 4
  • The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.
    • Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time (1995), Ch. 6 : The New King : Tyranny of the Corporate Core, p. 90
  • With great power comes great responsibility.
    • Voltaire: Voltaire. Jean, Adrien. Beuchot, Quentin and Miger, Pierre, Auguste. Œuvres de Voltaire, Volume 48. Lefèvre, 1832.
    • The sentiment is also found in Luke 12:48: "from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked" (NIV)

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations[edit]

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 622-24.
  • Give me a lever long enough
    And a prop strong enough,
    I can single handed move the world.
  • Odin, thou whirlwind, what a threat is this
    Thou threatenest what transcends thy might, even thine,
    For of all powers the mightiest far art thou,
    Lord over men on earth, and Gods in Heaven;
    Yet even from thee thyself hath been withheld
    One thing — to undo what thou thyself hast ruled.
  • The balance of power.
    • Edmund Burke, speech, (1741). Sir Robert Walpole—Speech. (1741). John Wesley—Journal, Sept. 20, 1790, ascribes it to "the King of Sweden." A German Diet, or the Ballance of Europe. Title of a Folio of 1653
  • Iron hand in a velvet glove.
    • Attributed to Charles V. Used also by Napoleon. See Carlyle, Latter Day Pamphlets, No, II
  • To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it: the pains of power are real, its pleasures imaginary.
  • Qui peut ce qui lui plaît, commande alors qu'il prie.
    • Whoever can do as he pleases, commands when he entreats.
    • Pierre Corneille, Sertorius, IV. 2
  • So mightiest powers by deepest calms are fed,
    And sleep, how oft, in things that gentlest be!
  • For what can power give more than food and drink,
    To live at ease, and not be bound to think?
  • Du bist noch nicht der Mann den Teufel festzuhalten.
  • O what is it proud slime will not believe
    Of his own worth, to hear it equal praised
    Thus with the gods?
  • Nihil est quod credere de se
    Non possit, quum laudatur dis æqua potestas.
    • There is nothing which power cannot believe of itself, when it is praised as equal to the gods.
    • Juvenal, Satires, IV. 70
  • Et qui nolunt occidere quemquam
    Posse volunt.
    • Those who do not wish to kill any one, wish they had the power.
    • Juvenal, Satires, X. 96
  • Without his rod revers'd,
    And backward mutters of dissevering power.
  • Ut desint vires tamen est laudanda voluntas.
    • Though the power be wanting, yet the wish is praiseworthy.
    • Ovid, Epistolæ Ex Ponto, III. 4. 79
  • A cane non magno sæpe tenetur aper.
    • The wild boar is often held by a small dog.
    • Ovid, Remedia Amoris, 422
  • Nunquam est fidelis cum potente societas.
    • A partnership with men in power is never safe.
    • Phaedrus, Fables, I. 5. 1
  • Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.
  • And deal damnation round the land.
  • The powers that be are ordained of God.
    • Romans, XIII. 1
  • The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
  • The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique.
  • Kann ich Armeen aus der Erde stampfen?
    Wächst mir ein Kornfeld in der flachen Hand?
    • Can I summon armies from the earth?
      Or grow a cornfield on my open palm?
    • Friedrich Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, I. 3
  • Ich fühle eine Armee in meiner Faust.
  • Quod non potest vult posse, qui nimium potest.
    • He who is too powerful, is still aiming at that degree of power which is unattainable.
    • Seneca, Hippolytus, 215
  • Minimum decet libere cui multum licet.
    • He who has great power should use it lightly.
    • Seneca, Troades, 336
  • No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
    But the whole boundless continent is yours.
    • Jonathan Sewall, Epilogue to Addison's Cato. Written for the performance at the Bow Street Theatre, Portsmouth, N. H
  • The awful shadow of some unseen Power
    Floats, tho' unseen, amongst us.
  • Power, like a desolating pestilence,
    Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
    Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
    Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
    A mechanized automaton.
  • Male imperando summum imperium amittitur.
    • The highest power may be lost by misrule.
    • Syrus, Maxims
  • Suspectum semper invisumque dominantibus qui proximus destinaretur.
    • Rulers always hate and suspect the next in succession.
    • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), I. 21
  • Imperium flagitio acquisitum nemo unquam bonis artibus exercuit.
    • Power acquired by guilt was never used for a good purpose.
    • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), I. 30
  • Imperium cupientibus nihil medium inter summa et præcipitia.
    • In the struggle between those seeking power there is no middle course.
    • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), II. 74
  • Potentiam cautis quam acribus consiliis tutius haberi.
    • Power is more safely retained by cautious than by severe councils.
    • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), XI. 29
  • Cupido dominandi cunctis affectibus flagrantior est.
    • Lust of power is the most flagrant of all the passions.
    • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), XV. 53
  • I thought that my invincible power would hold the world captive, leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.
  • He never sold the truth to serve the hour,
    Nor paltered with Eternal God for power.
  • Et errat longe, mea quidem sententia,
    Qui imperium credat esse gravius, aut stabilius,
    Vi quod fit, quam illud quod amicitia adjungitur.
    • And he makes a great mistake, in my opinion at least, who supposes that authority is firmer or better established when it is founded by force than that which is welded by affection.
    • Terence, Adelph, Act I. 1, line 40
  • Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.
    • If I can not influence the gods, I shall move all hell.
    • Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), VII. 312
  • An untoward event. (Threatening to disturb the balance of power.)
    • Duke of Wellington, on the destruction of the Turkish Navy at the battle of Navarino (Oct. 20, 1827)
  • A power is passing from the earth.

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