Quotes about power

If I cared for influence—which means, for the most part, making people do one's will, without knowing it—my first step toward it would be to be called, in common parlance, “slow but sure.”

Vanity Fair—Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read—who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted him; and in Vanity Fair he had a higher place than the most brilliant genius or spotless virtue.

Evil can be thought of as the exercise of political power — that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion in order to avoid extending oneself for the purpose of nurturing spiritual growth.

Stress, power, love. They didn’t change people, but they revealed people as who they were.

The hardest thing was to trust his own people to do their jobs well, but it was what he had to do. He wondered if the high consul suffered the same thing—knowing that all the critical action would be taken by others who were guided by his orders, but in conditions he could only guess at, and in places where his intervention, even if it were possible, could only muddy the waters. It was a subtle and terrible insight. The powerlessness of control.

In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful.

The hand that holds the money cracks the whip.

We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.

It was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you.

Nobody can be touched by that much power without being corrupted.

“Throughout the history of men there’s always been some kind of drug, and the people stuck on it. The people who push the stuff are on a different kind of drug, one so powerful that they are not aware of its own, ravaging, animalistic effect on them.”

“What’s that?”

“Power and greed,” he told her. “The ugliest—no, the second ugliest ravager of people ever known.”

“What’s the ugliest then?” she asked him.

“Fear,” he replied seriously. “It destroys, rots, and touches everyone around.”

I found that the rich whom I’d envied dreamed of greater riches, and that power came not from obeying the law but from not getting caught.