Insightful power quotes

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power-he's free again.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
Eric Hoffer

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
Thomas Jefferson

Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.
Napoleon I

Napoleon for the sake of a good name broke in pieces half the world.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
George Bernard Shaw

The world is ruled only by consideration of advantages.
To gain a crown by fighting is great, to reject it divine.
Power is the most persuasive rhetoric.
No emperor has the power to dictate to the heart.
Friedrich Schiller

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.
Jonathan Swif

What I do say is that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
Abraham Lincoln

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
Honore de Balzac

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.
AUNG SAN SUU KYI, Freedom from Fear

Power -- the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations -- was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.... Was this phenomenon ... the reason why such men, who were truly concerned with the workings of power, chose to stay away from its center, so that they might never lose sight of power's contours?
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Neverÿon