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.

Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.

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.

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.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

After a century of trying, we declared that healthcare in America is not a privilege for a few, it is a right for everybody. After decades of talk, we finally began to wean ourselves off foreign oil. We doubled our production of clean energy. We brought more of our troops home to their families, and we delivered justice to Osama bin Laden.

As this long and difficult war ends, I would like to address a few special words to the American people: Your steadfastness in supporting our insistence on peace with honor has made peace with honor possible.

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

A Constitution should be short and obscure.

We have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world, and it starts out with three words, ‚We, the people.‘

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.

Even if the politics needed doesn’t exist today, we still need to use our voices to make sure that the people in power are focused on the right things. Because this is a democracy, and in a democracy, people are the ones who run the country.

Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

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

A mission statement is not something you write overnight… But fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.

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.

Even today we raise our hand against our brother… We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves as if it were normal we continue to sow destruction, pain, death. Violence and war lead only to death.

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

I have been a firm believer in the federal structure of our country as enshrined in the Constitution.

Gains achieved at great cost against our enemy in Afghanistan are reversible.

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

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation – not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.

To bear means to support the weight of that which is held. It is a sacred trust to bear the priesthood, which is the mighty power and authority of God.

The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.

You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.

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 will is a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills; if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills; Nor can it choose its rider… the riders contend for its possession.

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.

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

In my view of the present aspect of affairs, there is no need of bloodshed and war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in favor of such a course, and I may say in advance, there will be no blood shed unless it be forced upon the government. The government will not use force unless force is used against it.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

I’m substantially concerned about the policy directions of the space agency. We have a situation in the U.S. where the White House and Congress are at odds over what the future direction should be. They’re sort of playing a game and NASA is the shuttlecock that they’re hitting back and forth.

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

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

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

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

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.

The most obvious characteristic of science is its application: the fact that, as a consequence of science, one has a power to do things. And the effect this power has had need hardly be mentioned. The whole industrial revolution would almost have been impossible without the development of science.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

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

The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

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

A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.

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

The Bill of Rights is not an a la carte menu.

People like to talk about war.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

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

I don’t think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.

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.

War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.

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

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.