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

My relationship to power and authority is that I’m all for it. People need somebody to watch over them. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.

To terrify children with the image of hell… to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

I’m not focused on the gay and lesbian movement.

The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.

For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.

If something can corrupt you, you’re corrupted already.

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

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

Why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth.

Whenever the speech is corrupted so is the mind.

Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion.

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.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

The devil ain’t got no power over me. The devil come, and me shake hands with the devil. Devil have his part to play. Devil’s a good friend, too… because when you don’t know him, that’s the time he can mosh you down.

For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.

We should understand the source of our authority and something of the keys that control its power.

I want to support other women because of the opportunities I’ve had – and I’ve had a lot of opportunities. What I try as a female director is to do the best job I can and, in the meantime, bring attention to as many other female directors and writers as I can.

Let us remember we are all part of one American family. We are united in common values, and that includes belief in equality under the law, basic respect for public order, and the right of peaceful protest.

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.

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.

Putin sought to keep Ukraine weak through corruption.

I groan daily under a body of sin and corruption. Oh for the time when I shall drop this flesh, and be free from sin!

It doesn’t matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I’m a woman or a man.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

I refuse to allow any man-made differences to separate me from any other human beings.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

To be successful, a woman has to be much better at her job than a man.

What’s important for my daughter to know is that… if you are fortunate to have opportunity, it is your duty to make sure other people have those opportunities as well.

We still have many neighborhoods that are racially identified. We still have many schools that even though the days of state-enforced segregation are gone, segregation because of geographical boundaries remains.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.

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.

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

I realized quickly what Mandela and Tambo meant to ordinary Africans. It was a place where they could come and find a sympathetic ear and a competent ally, a place where they would not be either turned away or cheated, a place where they might actually feel proud to be represented by men of their own skin color.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

If we do not lift up women and families, everyone will fall short.

Obama’s primary constituency was financial institutions. They were the core of the funding for his campaign. They expect to be paid back. And they were. They were paid back by coming out richer and more powerful than they were before the crisis that they created.

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

Woman was God’s second mistake.

All men are equal before fish.

The Canteen Boy, the reason you feel bad for him and you can laugh is because he, and I guess a lot of my characters, they don’t notice they’re getting made fun of. So they’ll say something back that’s not that great a quip, but in their mind they won the argument.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

Be as polite to the custodian as you are to the chairman of the board.

Therefore I am sure that this, my Coronation, is not the symbol of a power and a splendor that are gone but a declaration of our hopes for the future, and for the years I may, by God’s Grace and Mercy, be given to reign and serve you as your Queen.

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

Whether women are better than men I cannot say – but I can say they are certainly no worse.

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