Quotes About Power

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it. ”
― Roseanne Barr

“I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“How absurd it was that in all seven kingdoms, the weakest and most vulnerable of people - girls, women - went unarmed and were taught nothing of fighting, while the strong were trained to the highest reaches of their skill.”
― Kristin Cashore, Graceling

“Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.”
― Malcolm X

“There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."

(Keynote speech at Celebrating Inspiration luncheon with the WNBA's All-Decade Team, 2006)”
― Madeleine Albright

“Beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Keep your best wishes, close to your heart and watch what happens”
― Tony DeLiso, Legacy: The Power Within

“Power resides only where men believe it resides. [...] A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“This life is yours. Take the power to choose what you want to do and do it well. Take the power to love what you want in life and love it honestly. Take the power to walk in the forest and be a part of nature. Take the power to control your own life. No one else can do it for you. Take the power to make your life happy.”
― Susan Polis Schutz

“Patience is power.
Patience is not an absence of action;
rather it is "timing"
it waits on the right time to act,
for the right principles
and in the right way.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“Names have power.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“I’ve come to the conclusion that people who wear headphones while they walk, are much happier, more confident, and more beautiful individuals than someone making the solitary drudge to work without acknowledging their own interests and power.”
― Jason Mraz

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.”
― Margaret Thatcher

“She had never imagined she had the power to make someone else so happy. And not a magical power, either--a purely human one.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“Power changes everything till it is difficult to say who are the heroes and who the villains.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
― Philip K. Dick

“You gain power by pretending to be weak.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”
― John Steinbeck

“It is not truth that matters, but victory.”
― Adolf Hitler

“Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the horses the new strength of fear for the last mill so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia - the Horse and His boy

“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.”
― Toni Morrison

“If absolute power corrupts absolutely, where does that leave God?”
― George Deacon