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Quotes about power

213 quotes from 148 people

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’Tis written, gifts persuade
The gods in heaven; and gold is stronger made
Than words innumerable to bend men’s ways.
Euripides481–407 BCMedea (431 BC), Part 2, spoken by MedeaIn context
- Money
The goals of feminism can never be achieved through evolution, but only through revolution. Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle.
SFShulamith Firestone1945–2012The Dialectic of Sex (1970), ch. 2, p. 31
- Women
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
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
Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Paulo Freire1921–1997The Politics of Education (1985), Chapter 10, page 122
A nation’s strength ultimately consists in what it can do on its own, and not in what it can borrow from others.
Indira Gandhi1917–1984“Preface, 4th Five Year Plan”, Government of India Planning Commission (July 18, 1970).
By its very nature, non-violence cannot ‘seize’ power, nor can that be its goal. But non-violence can do more; it can effectively control and guide power without capturing the machinery of government. That is its beauty.
Mahatma Gandhi1869–1948Young India (Feb. 7, 1931) p. 162
- War & Peace
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
Nothing builds authority up like silence, splendor of the strong and shelter of the weak.
Charles de Gaulle1890–1970Le Fil de l’épée (1932)
- Talking
We like to think that tyrants are different from the rest of us. That they are somehow inhuman. They are not.
DGDavid Gemmell1948–2006The Swords of Night and Day, Ch. 10
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.
Emma Goldman1869–1940The Individual, Society and the State (1940)
My measures will not be crippled by any bureaucracy. Here I don’t have to worry about Justice; my mission is only to destroy and to exterminate, nothing more.
Hermann Göring1893–1946Speech in Frankfurt (3 March 1933), as quoted in Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny (1956) by Edward Crankshaw, p. 48
- Justice
Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.
David Graeber1961–2020Direct Action: An Ethnography (Oakland: AK Press: 2009), p. 203
- Freedom
Your greatest power in seduction is your ability to turn away, to make others come after you, delaying their satisfaction.
Robert Greeneborn 1959The Art of Seduction (2001)
- Love
Leadership does not mean domination.
Haile Selassie1892–1975Speech on Leadership in Speeches Delivered on Various Occasions, May 1957-December 1959 (1960), p. 138
- Leadership