5,584 Quotes About Power

It may happen that in a matrilineal system she has a very high position: but—beware—the presence of a woman chief or a queen at the head of a tribe absolutely does not mean that women are sovereign: the reign of Catherine the Great changed nothing in the fate of Russian peasant women; and they lived no less frequently in a state of abjection.

If you wish to be happy, you have to choose happiness over wealth, power, success or fame. You have to accord happiness the highest priority in life.

Ultimately, and this is where true power lies: no one can cast you out of the home in your heart.

The violence done by the more powerful entity - the police and the state - to the less powerful entity is so normalized, so banal, so expected, as to not even be discernible, not even visible. But angry resistance to that violence, coming from the less powerful and directed at the more powerful, is automatically understood as disruptive, dangerous, electric. The upset of power dynamics creates chaos.

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.

— Our world has money. Lots of it. Although more than half of us live on less than $2.00 a day, the money is there. Follow the crumbs on the trail. The money funds war, elections and poverty. Keep people living on and literally like the minimum wage and below it — keep people living less than alive. — love over power. power of love. Fudge the love of power construct — it’s not working. We gotta push hegemony, oppressive leadership and division over the cliff already! —

It is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge. That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters.

I recognized that hunger: a devouring thing that would gulp down lives with pleasure and would only pretend to care about law or justice, unless you had some greater power behind you that it couldn’t find a way to cheat or break, and that would never, never be satisfied.

The only power lies in the awareness of soul. An actor turned politician once told a monk, "Life makes us feel powerless every moment. People think that we (celebrities, politicians and elites) are powerful so we have to keep pretending that we are powerful. It's like sucking an empty milk bottle. It's so frustrating.