Force does not constitute right… obedience is due only to legitimate powers.

I don’t mind how much my Ministers talk, so long as they do what I say.

All my authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.

In Europe first and now in America, elected men have taken it upon themselves to indebt their people to create an atmosphere of dependency. And why? For their own selfish need to increase their own personal power.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

I know My God commands, whose power no power resists.

I love being American, and I love family. I love having a family, and I feel so blessed, and I feel like God gave me exactly what I wanted, so now I have to do the right thing in God’s eyes also. Just follow what God wants me to do.

I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it.

The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

One of the first duties of a Scout is obedience to authority. He must obey his orders in the first place and put his own amusement or desires in the second.

Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

The tragedy of America is that it entered all the wars with a consensus in favor of them, but within a defined period, the legitimacy of the war became a major domestic issue, with some people arguing that withdrawal was the only legitimate objective.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

Ethics and power are separate.

Power is competence.

I’m grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to.

No matter how you cut it, this real debate on personal accounts is about the legitimacy of Social Security; it’s not about the solvency of Social Security.

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.

Exceeds man’s might: that dwells with the gods above.

There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Here in the West, people often don’t like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.

Use power to help people. For we are given power not to advance our own purposes nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power and it is to serve people.

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

We should never let material things get ahead of God or become so important in our lives that we can’t walk away from them if He tells us to. Anything you own that has a hold on you is a problem.

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.

Chinese people need to be controlled; otherwise, they will do whatever they want.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Nature has always had more force than education.

To understand the power of the priesthood, we must know its limitations.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

The wisest have the most authority.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

The emotions in a song – the anger, aggression – have got to be legitimate.

Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once it slips, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable.

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

A master performer like Bill Clinton never lost sight of the fact that as president he had to project confidence and power, but if he was speaking to a group of autoworkers he would adjust his accent and his words to fit the audience, and do the same for a group of executives.

The biggest difference in the wet between F2 and F1 is that there’s so much more power in F1 as being on the throttle earlier has a bigger advantage.

War should only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself.

It takes tremendous discipline to control the influence, the power you have over other people’s lives.

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.

Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

The three most powerful and most apparent means used by Rome to retain her power over the minds of her votaries are Ignorance, Superstition, and Persecution.

I have always been grateful to Colonel Longley. He proved to me that when people in authority take a stand, good can come out of it.