One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent.

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.

Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

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

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

‚Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

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

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 management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

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.

I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time – for 40 years – and they’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

Governments don’t control people like they used to.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

Control is the source of strategic power.

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

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

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.

Power over a man’s subsistence is power over his will.

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

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

A word after a word after a word is power.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

When the external factors over which one has no control in a way start to become negative, it starts to affect our creative juices.

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can’t make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.

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

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

I realized the power of hip-hop. I realized how influential this music and this culture are.

Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption.

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.

The more a person seeks security, the more that person gives up control over their life.

These people are very unskilled in arms… with 50 men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.

Electricity is really just organized lightning.

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

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

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.

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

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

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

Power is the measure of the degree of control you have over circumstances in your life and the actions of the people around you. It is a skill that is developed by a deep understanding of human nature, of what truly motivates people, and of the manipulations necessary for advancement and protection.

You don’t need a lot of credentials to be prison guard in a federal prison. And, you know, you give them a set of keys and a weapon, and they’re in power.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it.

We’ve been programmed, from the time that we were very, very little, about what we can’t do – about what is impossible.

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

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

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

Power has only one duty – to secure the social welfare of the People.

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.

Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.

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.

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

It is more agreeable to have the power to give than to receive.

The world’s biggest power is the youth and beauty of a woman.

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.