Power is the great aphrodisiac.

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

Not necessity, not desire – no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything – health, food, a place to live, entertainment – they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.

I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

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.

Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.

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

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.

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.

A word after a word after a word is power.

I believe in benevolent dictatorship provided I am the dictator.

I repeat… that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that from the people and for the people all springs, and all must exist.

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.

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

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Power does not change you, it unmasks you.

We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

Married or single, you sisters possess distinctive capabilities and special intuition you have received as gifts from God. We brethren cannot duplicate your unique influence.

The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet’s corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

Affluence means influence.

I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?

When you really don’t like a guy, they’re all over you, and as soon as you act like you like them, they’re no longer interested.

You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person.

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

Is science of any value? I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

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

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

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.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

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.

The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

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

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

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.

At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.

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

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

Power is a complicated word and can take many forms.

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

Men are what their mothers made them.

I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.

It’s a mystery. That’s the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it’s mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion.

Nothing is so strongly fortified that it cannot be taken by money.

My mother was a powerful influence. She made me toe the line. If I didn’t have a perfect report card, she showed her disappointment.

Do something wonderful, people may imitate it.

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

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.

But there is a difference between cozying up to power and being close to power.

The Medici created and destroyed me.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.