101 quotes
“... privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom.”
"If you would know who controls you see who you may not criticise."
— Tacitus
"See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence."
— Noam Chomsky
"Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it."
— Milton Friedman
"The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class."
— Karl Marx
"Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven."
— John Milton
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
— George Orwell
"Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
"Power concedes nothing without a demand."
— Frederick Douglass
"The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist."
— Erich Fromm
"Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey."
— Diderot
"Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person."
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"To those who think them selves strong, force always seems the easiest solution."
— Barbara Tuchman
"Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty."
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable."
— Aldous Huxley
"Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs."
— Andrew Carnegie
"Valuing knowledge above all else results in a lust for power, and that leads men into dark and empty places."
— Veronica Roth
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
— Thucydides
"In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined."
— Thomas Szasz
"The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance."
— Thomas Paine
"Lust of power is the most flagrant of all the passions."