Top 91 Power And Abuse Quotes
#1. Our Constitution, which was intended to limit government power and abuse, has failed,
Ron Paul
#2. The president's attempted diktat takes money from bondholders and gives it a labor union that delivers money and votes for him ... Shaking down lenders for the benefit of political donors is recycled corruption and the abuse of power.
Cliff Asness
#3. The lust of dominion innovates so imperceptibly that we become complete despots before our wanton abuse of power is perceived; the tyranny first exercised in the nursery is exhibited in various shapes and degrees in every stage of our existence.
Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann
#4. The abuse of power manifests with phony spiritual teachers and phony gurus who tell you how to run your life and what to wear and what to eat, all that sort of stuff. They abuse. People don't realize that, listen to them and ruin their lives.
Frederick Lenz
#5. Real humility is graceful power, not a mandate to be victimized and abused.
Bryant McGill
#6. But many, perhaps most siblings share a private universe tropical with benevolence, betrayal, vendetta, reconciliation, and the use and abuse of power of which their parents know practically nothing.
Lauren Oliver
#7. The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
James Madison
#8. Vivisection is wrong because it is an abuse of man's power over the helpless, involving pain and suffering. The name for this is cruelty, and cruelty is immoral, no matter what the reason for its introduction.
Jon Evans
#9. It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict ... There is nothing inevitable about it. It is a weapon of war aimed at civilians. It has nothing to do with sex - everything to do with power. It is done to torture and humiliate innocent people and often very young children.
Angelina Jolie
#10. A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the last extremes of injustice and oppression.
Edward Gibbon
#11. You whiny little piece of shit," Rogan growled. Another punch. "We don't kill civilians. We don't show off in public and scare people." Another punch. "We don't abuse our power, you fucking moron. You're a disgrace.
Ilona Andrews
#12. In my case, I got hit a lot by bullies when I was a child, and so I naturally bristle against anybody who abuses power. And that seems to make me rather persistent when it comes to exposing the abuse of power.
Nick Davies
#13. A fondness for power is implanted in most men, and it is natural to abuse it when acquired.
Alexander Hamilton
#14. Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it.
George Washington
#15. Under the Bush administration, openness and accountability have been replaced by secrecy and evasion of responsibility. They abuse their power, conceal their actions from the American people, and refuse to hold officials accountable.
Edward Kennedy
#16. How can those who are invested with the power of government be prevented from the abuse of those powers as the means of aggrandizing themselves? ... Without a strong constitution to counteract the strong tendency of government to disorder and abuse there can be little progress or improvement.
John C. Calhoun
#17. The government is so out of control. It is so bloated and infested with fraud and deceit and corruption and abuse of power.
Ted Nugent
#18. Government power is always abused by seizing and perverting the law. And with few exceptions, government always determines what is law.
John Galt
#19. I think of my films as not necessarily political but more moral. Between my father, my stepfather, and my mother - they all felt pretty passionately about the importance of standing up and doing the right thing, and none of them were suck-ups. What motivates me is usually abuse of power.
Alex Gibney
#20. An absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life: the abuses of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy.
Terry Southern
#21. What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.
Isabel Allende
#22. Mysticism is the study of power, its use, and its abuse. At every moment you are getting stronger or you are growing weaker. At every moment your attention field is increasing or decreasing.
Frederick Lenz
#23. Dictators can fix up their entire families in good jobs, in or around government, and often do. In democracies, such a practice is frowned upon. Privileged access to the corridors of power through family connections and a kind of old boys' network, is also deemed an abuse of power, and so it is.
Jimmy Reid
#24. Selfishness and demagoguery take advantage of liberty. The selfish hand constantly seeks to control government, and every increase of governmental power, even to meet just needs, furnishes opportunity for abuse and stimulates the effort to bend it to improper uses.
Charles Evans Hughes
#25. There are two things that interest me - and they're both power, ultimately. One is not having it and one is abusing it.
Joss Whedon
#26. No one's ever sat me down and taught me what empathy is or why it matters more than power or patriotism or religious faith. But I learn it right there in the hallway: I cannot do what's been done to me.
Zak Ebrahim
#27. In acknowledging woman-to-woman help it is important to recognize that power, within the family and elsewhere, can be used vindictively, and that it is not only powerful men who abuse women; women with power may also abuse other women.
Sheila Kitzinger
#28. Power is something that is abused. I suppose use and abuse are in the eye of the beholder.
Frederick Lenz
#29. There is no question that chemical weapons attacks are a heinous abuse of humanity and power. But to assume that military strikes are an effective retribution for the crime committed is wrong.
Basmah Bint Saud
#30. If you abuse power, you will be burned and then you will learn ... if you live.
Frederick Lenz
#31. Bullies want to abuse you. Instead of allowing that, you can use them as your personal motivators. Power up and let the bully eat your dust.
Nick Vujicic
#32. great men are urged on to the abuse of power (when they need urging, which is not often), by their flatterers and dependents,
Charles Dickens
#33. In speaking powerfully and eloquently for mercy and reconciliation to people divided by old hatreds and persecuted by abuse of power, the Holy Father was a beacon of light not just for Catholics, but for all people.
William J. Clinton
#34. I am not content to entrust our free-speech rights to the good graces and whims of Congress and hope that politicians don't abuse their power.
Ted Cruz
#35. The social havoc wreaked by unfettered economic greed comes to be interiorised as the personal weakness and irresponsibility of those principally affected.
David Smail
#36. It is this dependency that became, and is, the breeding ground for abuses of power.
Bell Hooks
#37. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.
Thomas Pynchon
#38. Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it.
Lincoln Steffens
#39. An economic system can remain viable only so long as society has mechanisms to counter abuses of either state or market power and the erosion of the natural, social, and moral capital that such abuses commonly exacerbate.
David Korten
#40. How do you overcome the negative karmas and problems and misery that occur to people who abuse power? You stop abusing power.
Frederick Lenz
#42. The abuse of power, Benton says. It all comes back to that. We want to be like God. If we can't create, we'll destroy, and once we've done it, once is not enough.
Patricia Cornwell
#43. I think it's child abuse to have someone in the public eye too young. Society basically values wealth and fame and power at the cost of well-being. In the case of a child, it's at the cost of someone's natural development. It's already hard enough to develop.
Alanis Morissette
#44. What is samkit (enlightened view; right belief)? One has to realize the complete authoritative power, and accept everyone's worldly authority. People abuse their acquired authority and consequently loose their right for human birth (manushyapanu). Accept whatever authority one has.
Dada Bhagwan
#45. It's funny, because there are so many stereotypes out there about actors and movie stars in general, but I've had a great opportunity to meet a lot of them, and maybe it's just because they don't behave that way around me, but I rarely see that kind of abuse of power.
Ryan Reynolds
#46. The very purpose of the Second Amendment is to stop the government from disallowing people the means to defend themselves against tyranny. Any proposal to abuse executive power and infringe upon gun rights must be repelled with the stiffest legislative force possible.
Steve Stockman
#48. We are under God's power, and we can do nothing but by the power of God, and woe shall hereafter be to us if we abuse this power.
John Wycliffe
#49. The best guarantee against the abuse of power consists in the freedom, the purity, and the frequency of popular elections.
John Quincy Adams
#50. The true patriot is motivated by a sense of responsibility and out of self interest for himself, his family, and the future of his country to resist government abuse of power. He rejects the notion that patriotism means obedience to the state.
Ron Paul
#51. Every American, regardless of their background, has the right to live free of unwarranted government intrusion. Repealing the worst provisions of the Patriot Act will reign in this gross abuse of power and restore to everyone our basic Constitutional rights.
Pete Stark
#52. I know you're competent and your thesis advisor knows you're competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you're doing?"
This was said to a young woman who had already spent five years and over $10,000 getting to that point in her Ph.D. program.
Joanna Russ
#53. Someone who really wants to discover themselves has to be particularly careful about the use and abuse of power. But even your average human being just passing through another life has to be careful.
Frederick Lenz
#54. Bill Clinton was impeached primarily for criminal conduct: lying under oath and misleading a federal grand jury about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Nixon would have been impeached for a wide array of criminal acts, as well as abuses of power.
Jonathan Turley
#55. I'M CONFUSED, because I don't know why it's so hard to obey a policeman. You will not win!!! And I don't know why some policeman abuse their power. Power is a responsibility, not a weapon to brandish and lord over the populace.
Benjamin Watson
#56. The right of self defense never ceases. It is among the most sacred, and alike necessary to nations and to individuals, and whether the attack be made by Spain herself or by those who abuse her power, its obligation is not the less strong.
James Monroe
#57. And journalism itself has changed. News organizations and some journalists have transformed from their traditional role as watchdogs of power into institutions of power themselves with an ability, indeed, a susceptibility, to abuse that power.
Joan Konner
#58. Democracy must be built through open societies that share information. When there is information, there is enlightenment. When there is debate, there are solutions. When there is no sharing of power, no rule of law, no accountability, there is abuse, corruption, subjugation and indignation.
Atifete Jahjaga
#59. The challenge of power is how to use it and not abuse it. When you abuse it, it reverses on you and it hurts you.
Frederick Lenz
#60. Media is a big problem around the world, it's powerful and can abuse its power.
Julian Assange
#61. The threat to change Senate rules is a raw abuse of power and will destroy the very checks and balances our founding fathers put in place to prevent absolute power by any one branch of government,
Harry Reid
#62. The democratic state can sometimes abuse its power as much as those who seek to destroy it abuse fundamental rights and democratic practices.
David Blunkett
#63. This House cannot function without an open, accountable, and independent ethics process; and the molestation of that process by the majority is an abuse of power that cannot stand.
Louise Slaughter
#64. If he were any other man, I might have suspected him of substance abuse, of being coked up or something. But Barrons was too much a purist for that; his drugs were money, power, and control
Karen Marie Moning
#65. When a long abuse of power is corrected, it is generally replaced by an opposite violence. In the new dispensation all that was good in what went before is tarred indiscriminately with the bad.
John McGahern
#66. Sit peacefully in a church and think of church history: witchburning perhaps, or child abuse, genocide, the amassing of disgusting wealth, the repression of women, inquisitions, castrating child choir singers, the denial of Santa Claus and the support of fascists in power.
Kaz Cooke
#67. With power comes the abuse of power. And where there are bosses, there are crazy bosses. It's nothing new.
Judd Rose
#68. You can use power for good or bad, for control or freedom. You grew up watching your dad abuse it one way and it made you take the opposite direction. That's what we all think. Everything's about balance. That's what sustains life. Maybe your role is to keep your dad in check?
Katie Kacvinsky
#69. Once again, President Clinton is using American troops to deflect attention from his record of lies, distortions, obstructions of justice and abuse of power.
Ron Paul
#70. I'm of that generation of Jews still deeply influenced by the Holocaust. Certainly the notion that the state power to kill can be subject to such extraordinary abuse is always lurking beneath the surface for me. Certainly my experience and identity as a Jew is there.
Scott Turow
#71. I write about power, that's my real subject - how you get it, what you do with it, how you abuse it. I'm equally wary of liberals and conservatives.
Rene Balcer
#72. It's amazing how much power each of us has when it comes to how we make other people feel about themselves. Whether we realize it or not, we have the ability to affect and shape people, for better or for worse. I hope I never abuse my power.
Krista Doyle
#73. I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally.
Glenn Greenwald
#74. We can decrease abuse and murder when we get that for both sexes, abuse does not derive from power, but powerlessness.
Warren Farrell
#75. Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.
Madeleine L'Engle
#76. It is an abuse of power, when you are President of the United States, to use the White House to single out a single news organization, and castigate them and try to delegitimize them.
Monica Crowley
#77. Anyone entrusted with power will abuse it if not also animated with the love of truth and virtue, no matter whether he be a prince, or one of the people.
Jean De La Fontaine
#78. Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity; in woman, fantasy.
Honore De Balzac
#79. Men should do their actual living and working in communities small enough to permit of genuine self-government and the assumption of personal responsibilities, federated into larger units in such a way that the temptation to abuse great power should not arise.
Mahatma Gandhi
#80. To be evil at all, Satan needs good things he can abuse, things like intelligence, power and will. Those good things come from God.
J. Budziszewski
#81. If men like [Ken] Starr and his allies could ignore the Constitution and abuse power for ideological and malicious ends to topple a President, I feared for my country.
Hillary Clinton
#82. The presumed causes of Americas troubles can be summed up simply: the evils of unlimited competition, and abuses by those with economic power.
Charles A. Reich
#83. It is a sad truth that those who crave and seek power, invariably abuse that power once they obtain it.
Ian Gregoire
#84. Human rights violations are nit accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm.
Paul Farmer
#85. Shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of my mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom, with power, because I have been followed with one cry of abuse ever since for not being a Government tool?
William Hazlitt
#86. When any one person or body of men seize into their hands the power in the last resort, there is properly no longer a government, but what Aristotle and his followers call the abuse and corruption of one.
Jonathan Swift
#87. Capitaine Etienne Relais was known to be incorruptible in an ambience in which vice was the norm, honor for sale, and laws made to be broken, and men operated on the assumption that he who did not abuse power did not deserve to have it.
Isabel Allende
#88. If knowledge is power, let's spread it as widely as possible and dilute it to deny those who would abuse it.
Stuart Aken
#89. All you care about is the control and power you have over me and I hate myself for giving that to you!
Lydia Kelly
#90. Persecution has not crushed it, power has not beaten it back, time has not abated its force, and, what is most wonderful of all, the abuses and treasons of its friends have not shaken its stability.
Horace Bushnell
#91. The lesson for me was clear: national security officials do not like the light. They act abusively and thuggishly only when they believe they are safe, in the dark. Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only real antidote.
Glenn Greenwald
