Quotes about power

Eminent men were called on to take command and arrange suitable measures. They immediately acted as eminent men so often do; they took action to retain their eminence. Their first instinct was caution. When a man is important enough, it does not matter if he never does anything. It is only required of him that he do nothing wrong. Eminent figures all over the world prepared to do nothing wrong. They were not so concerned to do anything right.

It is an inflexible law that all living things must seek to dominate their environment.

It is the curse of absolute power, Olek. There is no one to admonish you, no laws save those you make. We like to believe there is something special, even alien, about evil. We like to think that tyrants are different from the rest of us. That they are somehow inhuman. They are not. They are merely unchained, unfettered; free to do as they please.

"No golden age to discover now," he whispered. "No end to disease and starvation. No, bright sparkling cities reaching the clouds ... All that I have lived for is gone now. I am so tired."

"Then think on this, priest: You stopped the Eternal from finding greater weapons. Your actions here have led to her death. The world is free again."

"Free? Of one tyrant perhaps. You think there will be no others?"

"No, I do not. But I know there will always be men to stand against them. You grieve because of a pure magic lost. That magic was corrupted by evil. This is how evil thrives. We find an herb that cures disease, and someone will make a poison from it. We forge iron to make a better plow, and someone will make a sharper sword. There can be no power that evil will not corrupt."

"It seems to me that a man has only as much power as we allow him. Can Ceska move mountains? Can he put out the stars? Can he tell rain to fall? He is only a man, and if everyone disobeyed him, he would fall. But they don’t, do they? It is said that he has an army of forty thousand men. Men. Drenai men! Ready to march on other Drenai men. At least in the Nadir Wars we were sure of our enemy. Now there is no enemy. Only failed friends.”

While men compete in war, there will be warriors. While there are warriors, there will be princes among warriors. Among the princes will be kings, and among the kings an emperor.

Steal a loaf of bread and they hang you, steal a land and they'll make you king.

To be frank, politics is about wanting power, getting it, exercising it, and keeping it.

Those with power would always find some way to exert it over those who didn’t.

What happened when people who’d once possessed absolute power suddenly lost it?

Sky’s forecourt had been designed by my late sister, Kurue, who had understood two key elements of the mortal psyche: they hate being reminded of their own insignificance, yet they simultaneously and instinctively expect their leaders to be overwhelmingly dominant.

But perhaps that was just the way of power: no such thing as too much.