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Power
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“What fascinates me — mesmerizes me — isn't so much Trump himself as the American government he's crafted: a major world power with no policy, no consistency, and no idea what it's doing.”
Stephen King (born 1947) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Twitter (1 April 2018); also quoted in "37 of the most brutal Trump burns tweeted by Stephen King in 2018" by Sam Haysom, at Mashable (27 December 2018)
“I don't think there was anything in my brain right then except the usual background static -- the kind you get on your radio when it's turned up all the way and tuned to no station at all. My brain had checked to the power, so to speak; the little guy wearing the Napoleon hat inside was showing aces and betting them.”
Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You couldn't get hold of the things you'd done and turn them right again. Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.”
Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don't forget that you're a physical being with a power-plant to take care of and maintain. I'm talking about the bod under the blue gown. I'm not going to say that we're a lazy, overweight society, a fast-food eatin', SUV-ridin', soda-guzzlin', beer-chuggin', TV-watchin', size-XL-wearin', walk-don't-run generation...except I guess I just did.”
Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His own infinity becomes zero in relation to that of the least fragment of the solid. He hardly exists at all. Trillions multiplies by trillions of trillions of such as he could not cross the frontier even of breadth, the idea which he came to guess at only because he felt himself bound by some mysterious power.”
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Adaptation to one's environment makes for a sort of survival; but after all, the supreme victory is only won by those who prove themselves of so much hardier stuff than the rest that no power on earth is able to destroy them. The people who have really made history are the martyrs.”
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.”
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And when you see a man who is repining at the approach of death, is not his reluctance a sufficient proof that he is not a lover of wisdom, but a lover of the body, and probably at the same time a lover of either money or power, or both?”
Socrates (470–399 BC) said by 399 BC at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.”
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cities of the Red Night (1981)
“In Mohammedanism the narrow principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as in the Far East, regarded as existent in an immediately sensory way but is conceived as the one infinite power elevated above all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, the religion of sublimity.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) said by 1831 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hegel, Philosophy of Mind (quoted by W. Wallace & A. V. Miller in Philosophy of Mind, Oxford 2010; also quoted in other words by Slavoj Žižek in A Glance into the Archives of Islam, Lacan dot com, 1997).
“The Being of the universe, at first hidden and concealed, has no power which can offer resistance to the search for knowledge ; it has to lay itself open before the seeker — to set before his eyes and give for his enjoyment, its riches and its depths. p xii”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) said by 1831 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What the history of Philosophy shows us is a succession of noble minds, a gallery of heroes of thought, who, by the power of reason, have penetrated into the being of things, of nature and of spirit, into the Being of God, and have won for us by their labours the highest treasure, the treasure of reasoned knowledge. Introduction p. 1”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) said by 1831 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lectures on the history of philosophy, Translated from German by E. S. Haldane in Three Volumes (1892-96) full text
“The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) said by 1831 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“# History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world.”
Heraclitus (535–471 BC) said by 471 BC at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The transfiguring touch was to come, it seemed from a girl's lips; but it had not; he kissed, and life remained uncharmed. ...at the bottom of his heart, he was still expecting the transfiguring touch to come, some day, from something he was to obtain or do, perhaps to-morrow.... Then he had by accident found out the sigil's power...”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am Manuel, and I follow after my own thinking and my own desire. Of course it is very fine of me to be renouncing so much wealth and power for the sake of my wonderful dear Niafer: but she is worth the sacrifice, and, besides, she is witnessing all this magnanimity, and cannot well fail to be impressed.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am content. While my shrewd fellows rode about the world to seek and to attain power and wisdom, I have elected, as and unpractical realist, to follow after beauty.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dark forces dragged me away from the keyboard, swirling forces of irresistible intensity and power.”
Boris Johnson (born 1964) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A wise guy playing the fool to win", The Sunday Times (16 July 2000), p. 17.
“I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall, and I'd listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse, next door, over, over in England, as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory Party, and, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of, of power.”
Boris Johnson (born 1964) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interviewed on Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4 (30 October 2005)
“The power to distinguish between person and performance and to communicate intrinsic worth flows naturally out of our own sense of intrinsic worth.”
Stephen Covey (1932–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are product of neither nature nor nurture; we are a product of choice, because there is always a space between stimulus and response. As we wisely exercise our power to choose based on principles, the space will become larger.”
Stephen Covey (1932–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because of the space between stimulus and response, people have the power of choice; therefore, leaders are neither born nor made — meaning environmentally trained and nurtured. They are self-made through chosen responses, and if they choose based on principles and develop increasingly greater discipline, their freedom to choose increases.”
Stephen Covey (1932–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”
Ayn Rand (1905–1982) said by 1982 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Statism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power -- to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed. ... Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.”
Ayn Rand (1905–1982) said by 1982 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system—and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.”
Ayn Rand (1905–1982) said by 1982 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) said by 1926 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If fine speech-making, appeals to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field.”
Dick Cheney (1941–2025) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the American Enterprise Institute (21 May 2009)
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: , footnote (1888 edition)
“The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word. What the proletarian needs, he can obtain only from this bourgeoisie, which is protected in its monopoly by the power of the state. The proletarian is, therefore, in law and in fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death.”
Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is an act of the soul, not of the intellect. When we are dealing with people's dreams — their visions, really — we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We invoke the Great Creator when we invoke our own creativity, and that creative force has the power to alter lives, fulfill destinies, and answer our dreams.”
Julia Cameron (born 1948) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Inspirations : Meditations from The Artist's Way (2001), "Invocation
“Be Impeccable with Your Word. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.”
Miguel Ángel Ruiz (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We were... A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other... In age we lose everything; even the power to love.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To understand political power aright, and derive from it its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.”
John Locke (1632–1704) said by 1704 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.”
John Locke (1632–1704) said by 1704 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body, why will he part with his freedom, this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power?”
John Locke (1632–1704) said by 1704 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You have not that power you ought to have over him, till he comes to be more afraid of offending so good a friend than of losing some part of his future expectation.”
John Locke (1632–1704) said by 1704 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not just power, but impotence, that corrupts people. It gives them the mind and soul of slaves. It makes them indifferent, lazy, cynical, irresponsible, and, above all, stupid.”
John Holt (1923–1985) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Escape from Childhood (1974).
“Reason is like an officer when the King appears; The officer then loses his power and hides himself. Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.”
Rumi (1207–1273) said by 1273 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The vision of the gods without the power of the gods. What a terrible gift.A glorious gift.”
Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She had that irony in her eyes. Knowledge without wisdom. Power without purpose. Like me.”
Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You really are children. You have no idea how power works, or who has it, or what you can actually do with it.”
Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was his father who had shrunk, who no longer had the power of the giant, of the god, to enfold him and keep him safe.”
Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I have to choose between an omnipotent God who leaves the world in this condition, and a God who has only a little bit of power but really cares and tries to make things better, I'll take you every time. Go on playing God, Hyrum. You're not bad at it. Sometimes you kind of get it right.”
Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a way, he lost some of himself, some of his knack, and therefore some of the choices he might have had in life. But in losing those, he gained so much more freedom, so much more power, that he was clear winner in the bargain.”
Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whenever the law gets its hands on you, those who use the law to their own advantage will also turn it against you. Don't put your trust in the laws of men, Alvin. They were designed by strong men to improve their power over weaker ones.”
Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evil people naturally assume that you will use that power exactly as they would use it.”
Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That is the ultimate power, to stare death in the face and be unafraid.”
Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn't just survive, but deserves to.”
Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1895 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) edited by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 225