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Quotes about power

213 quotes from 148 people

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A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.
George Orwell1903–1950The Prevention of Literature (1946)
- Government
To be a revolutionary you have to be a human being. You have to care about people who have no power.
Jane Fondaborn 1937Newsweek, 1977, in reference to Jean-Luc Godard
- Politics
In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson1743–1826Kentucky Resolutions (1798), Resolution 9
- Government
I’m not afraid to be sexy. A woman who is intelligent and also knows how to weaponize her beauty… there’s nothing more dangerous than that. There’s nothing more powerful than that.
Megan Foxborn 1986Megan Fox reveals thoughts on being Hollywood ‘sex symbol’ at Met Gala: ‘I’m not afraid to be sexy’ USA Today. (September 13, 2021)
- Beauty
- Women
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley1792–1822Ozymandias (1818)In context
- Time
All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office.
George Washington1732–1799Letter to Catherine Macaulay Graham (9 January 1790)
- Presidency
An incumbent in Washington knows he is in trouble on the day that cartoonists begin to represent him as a king.
Christopher Hitchens1949–2011The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favourite Fetish (1990)
- Presidency
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley1792–1822Queen Mab (1813), Canto III
- Freedom
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
Thomas Pynchonborn 1937Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Part 3, Proverbs for Paranoids
- Thinking
When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes.
Karl Marx1818–1883Remarks against personality cults from a letter to W. Blos (10 November 1877).
The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable.
John F. Kennedy1917–1963Speech at Amherst College (26 October 1963)
I am not pleading for India to practice nonviolence because it is weak. I want her to practice nonviolence being conscious of her strength and power.
Mahatma Gandhi1869–1948The Doctrine of the Sword, Young India (11 August 1920)
- War & Peace
Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.
James Madison1751–1836Letter to Thomas Jefferson (17 October 1788), in The Writings of James Madison, Vol. 5 (1904)
- Government
The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.
James Madison1751–1836Federalist No. 48 (1 February 1788)
- Government
People may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they’ll join your side.
Condoleezza Riceborn 1954Advice to her protégée Kiron Skinner while Provost of Stanford University, as quoted in James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans (2004), p. 227