Power

"Valta menee päähän. (Askola, Uusimaa) (KRA)"

"And deal damnation round the land."

"Ut desint vires tamen est laudanda voluntas."

"For we put the power in the people."

"Quod non potest vult posse, qui nimium potest."

"Unlimited power corrupts the possessor."

"Nunquam est fidelis cum potente societas."

"I thought that my invincible power would hold the world captive, leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip."

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

"They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people's Government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people."

"A power is passing from the earth."

"No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, But the whole boundless continent is yours."

"Ich fühle eine Armee in meiner Faust."

"A cane non magno sæpe tenetur aper."

"Kann ich Armeen aus der Erde stampfen? Wächst mir ein Kornfeld in der flachen Hand?"

"The powers that be are ordained of God."

"Minimum decet libere cui multum licet."

"Male imperando summum imperium amittitur."

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."

"From this we learn that a wise prince sees to it that never, in order to attack someone, does he become the ally of a prince more powerful than himself, except when necessity forces him, as I said above. If you win, you are the powerful king's prisoner, and wise princes avoid as much as they can being in other men's power."

"The power of Kings and Magistrates is nothing else, but what is only derivative, transferr'd and committed to them in trust from the People, to the Common good of them all, in whom the power yet remaines fundamentally, and cannot be tak'n from them, without a violation of thir natural birthright."

"When I resist, therefore, when I as a Democrat resist the concentration of power, I am resisting the processes of death, because the concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human initiative, and, therefore of human energy."

"In the main it will be found that a power over a man's support [salary] is a power over his will."

"There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."

"Et errat longe, mea quidem sententia, Qui imperium credat esse gravius, aut stabilius, Vi quod fit, quam illud quod amicitia adjungitur."

"The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats, tho' unseen, amongst us."

"He never sold the truth to serve the hour, Nor paltered with Eternal God for power."

"It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery."

"What real power can buy, of course, is anonymity."

"Every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No And pressing forward honor reality.We cannot avoid Using power, Cannot escape the compulsion To afflict the world, So let us, cautious in diction And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully."

"Nearest the king, nearest the gallows."

"Power expands through the distribution of secrecy."

"Colin felt a shiver pass down his spine. What man, granted total power, could refrain from using it? And would not his first target inevitably be his fellow men?"

"The crucial question is whether one is safe in assuming that the immense machinery of power that has resulted from activity of the utilitarian type can be made, on anything like present lines, to serve disinterested ends; whether it will not rather minister to the egoistic aims either of national groups or of individuals."

"Who is all-powerful should fear everything."

"A right, in the abstract, is a fact; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never."

"I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER."

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."

"It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them."

"There are clear and predictable consequences for the world if human beings continue to rape the earth and plunder its resources; to exploit, oppress, and dominate the weak and the poor for the sake of greed and the hunger for power; to depend on ever-rising levels of violence and ever more lethal instruments of death and destruction in order to secure positions of power and privilege."

"Power wears out those who don't have it."

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."

"One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character."

"Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society."

"At a certain point power becomes very frightening, and to really begin to reconstruct civilization means to really act in a powerful way. And power is the thing that women have been taught is a real taboo."

"One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society."

"The analysis [of power] should not attempt to consider power from its internal point of view and...should refrain from posing the labyrinthine and unanswerable question: 'Who then has power and what has he in mind? What is the aim of someone who possesses power?' Instead, it is a case of studying power at the point where its intention, if it has one, is completely invested in its real and effective practices."

"Let us ask ... how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc....we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects."

"Power is everywhere ... because it comes from everywhere."

"Then, everlasting Love, restrain thy will; 'Tis god-like to have power, but not to kill."