My experience with power, you can maintain it, or you get it taken from you. You get you some newfound power and go crazy, and it get taken from you quick.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

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 believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

Getting in and out of the car with the halo takes a bit of experience. I struggled initially, but after a few trial runs I was fine.

Power and speed be hands and feet.

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

In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get – The Future!

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

My role 14 years ago in Richard III – that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it – they have all the fun!

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.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Growing up I didn’t watch movies.

Anyone who seeks to destroy the passions instead of controlling them is trying to play the angel.

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.

Do not give in too much to feelings. A overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth.

Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.

I’ve lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

Electricity is really just organized lightning.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

Swimming has its educational value – mental, moral, and physical – in giving you a sense of mastery over an element, and of power of saving life, and in the development of wind and limb.

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

I don’t think your ability to fight has anything to do with how big you are. It’s to do with how much anger is in you.

Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.

When anger rises, think of the consequences.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

Power is like being a lady… if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space where we choose our response.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.

The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

I think our democracy has it exactly right: two terms, eight years. It’s enough. Because it’s important to have one foot in reality when you have access to this kind of power.

A whole people with the ballot in their hands possess the most conclusive and unlimited power ever entrusted to humanity.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

Senator Kerry has been in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue.

For me, there are two types of people: the young and the experienced.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.

Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.