Power Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

F. Scott Fitzgerald

J. K. Rowling

Karl Marx

Charles Darwin

Leonardo da Vinci

René Descartes

Mao Zedong

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn.

Miguel de Cervantes

We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.

Either you think - or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

Theodor W. Adorno

Experience does not err; only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power. Men wrongly complain of Experience; with great abuse they accuse her of leading them astray but they set Experience aside, turning from it with complaints as to our ignorance causing us to be carried away by vain and foolish desires to promise ourselves, in her name, things that are not in her power; saying that she is fallacious. Men are unjust in complaining of innocent Experience, constantly accusing her of error and of false evidence.

Leonardo da Vinci

Every Communist must grasp the truth, 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun'.

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my life.

A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.

René Descartes

The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it – the speed of his acceptance.

The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.

Frederick Law Olmsted

There is a weird power in a spoken word.... And a word carries far—very far — deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

In regard to the terrors as well as the superstitions and immoralities of religion, it will not do to urge that they are due only to the imperfections of the men who professed the various religions. If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good.

Morris Raphael Cohen

I would not send a poor girl into the world, ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself.

Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.

Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.

Walter Rauschenbusch

A monarchy is the most expensive of all forms of government, the regal state requiring a costly parade, and he who depends on his own power to rule, must strengthen that power by bribing the active and enterprising whom he cannot intimidate.

James Fenimore Cooper

Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.

All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

I am not now in fortune's power:
He that is down can fall no lower.

Samuel Butler (poet)

All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the cause of endless strife.... Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.

One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of Peace. Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train.

Morihei Ueshiba

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.

Thomas Robert Malthus