Quotes About Dangerous Power

#1. Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.

Edward Abbey

#2. Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers "is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today,

Robert D. Kaplan

#3. The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.

Felix Frankfurter

#4. Words ... have always held the dangerous power to conjure things into being.

Kelly Creagh

#5. Words, Isobel, have always held the dangerous power to conjure things into being. Remember that.

Kelly Creagh

#6. In so-called primitive societies there are two words for power, mana and taboo: the power which creates and the power which destroys; the power which is benign and the power which is malign. Odd that we have retained in our vocabulary the word for dangerous power, taboo, and have lost mana.

Madeleine L'Engle

#7. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man

David Crockett

#8. Both sides in Syria are bad. One side is a brutal dictator, and the other includes Islamists and terrorists who are dangerous already and who would be brutal in power if given the chance.

Newt Gingrich

#9. Magic is the craft of shaping, the craft of the wise, exhilarating, dangerous - the ultimate adventure. The power of magic should not be underestimated. It works, often in ways that are unexpected and difficult to control.

Starhawk

#10. Power in the hands of the stupid is often a dangerous thing. Hitler proved it.

Siddharth Katragadda

#11. All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time

Aldous Huxley

#12. In your hands or that of any other person, so much power would, no doubt, be dangerous. I am the only man in the world whom it would be safe to trust with it. Remember, I am a prophet!

Joseph Smith Jr.

#13. I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money, are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.

Thomas Jefferson

#14. He is an idiot," I said. "One who thinks he's a genius/ They're the most dangerous kind."
"No, the most dangerous kind are the ones with power," he said.

Aimee Carter

#15. He remembers noticing his dad's shadow was shorter than the others, and he had a visceral sense his father was weaker than the rest, and that he was more dangerous as a weak person with a lot of power than a powerful person with a lot of power.

Jardine Libaire

#16. When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

Edward Snowden

#17. Knowledge is a dangerous thing. But ignorance is no protection.

Masha Du Toit

#18. Privileged to share in the athletic power of a large and dangerous animal willing to be controlled by the small, frail strength of a mere human being.

Mary Doria Russell

#19. Therefore, beware of everything that takes away your freedom. Know that it is dangerous, and avoid it by all the means in your power.

Swami Vivekananda

#20. There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.

Ida Tarbell

#21. America's most dangerous and threatening black man is the one who has been kept sealed up by the Northerner in the black ghettos - the Northern white power structure's system to keep talking democracy while keeping the black man out of sight somewhere, around the corner.

Malcolm X

#22. Every one knows that the exercise of military power is forever dangerous to civil rights; and we have had recent instances of violences that have been offer'd to private subjects ...

Samuel Adams

#23. A wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow ...

Ursula K. Le Guin

#24. We ordinary people might lack your great speed or your X-Ray vision, Superman, but never underestimate the power of the human mind. We carry the most dangerous weapon on Earth inside these thick skulls of ours.

Mark Millar

#25. Through the loveliness and power of her dream world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth

Karen Blixen

#26. I think in the corridors of power these dangerous kinds of orders are issued in a much more vague way, passed down two or three levels of command before they're given to the assassin.

Eddie Campbell

#27. Kissing a witch is a perilous business. Everybody knows it's ten times as dangerous as letting her touch your hand, or cut your hair, or steal your shoes. What simpler way is there than a kiss to give power a way into your heart?

Emma Donoghue

#28. It is always unconscionable for the government to punish people for expressing an idea merely because government officials - or the majority of citizens - decide that those ideas are 'dangerous' or 'wrong.' That is a power nobody ought to possess.

Glenn Greenwald

#29. Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.

Rudolph Rummel

#30. A silhouette stepped toward us, and another wave of pure power ripped through the throne room. 'I'm only going to warn you once, Cronus,' said a voice, dark and dangerous. 'Get the hell away from my wife.

Aimee Carter

#31. Szeth could feel the Light's warmth, its fury, like a tempest that had been injected directly into his veins. The power of it was invigorating but dangerous. It pushed him to act. To move. To strike.

Brandon Sanderson

#32. The theoretically unrestricted right to develop power, to wage war against other states, is antisocial and is doubly dangerous, because the state as a mass entity represents a low moral and intellectual level.

Christian Lous Lange

#33. There was no simple riddance to the power of a dangerous political idea; no assassination possible to avert a disruptive change in technology; no natural death to be counted on to stop an economic change that ripped up ancestral estates or stirred up class discontent.

Robert Heilbroner

#34. The fear of not being remembered is a dangerous thing.

Carla H. Krueger

#35. There is not a more dangerous experiment than to place property in the hands of one class, and political power in those of another ... If property cannot retain the political power, the political power will draw after it the property.

Daniel Webster

#36. Those who have come into Formula One without experiencing cars devoid of electronic aids will find it tough. To control 800 horse power relying just on arm muscles and foot sensitivity can turn out to be a dangerous exercise.

Michael Schumacher

#37. Next to power without honor, the most dangerous thing in the world is power without humor.

Eric Sevareid

#38. Politicians as a class are dangerous, that people who are seeking power over us are not, by definition, our friends.

James Bovard

#39. Developing the power within, to have the confidence to take charge in the most difficult and dangerous of situations, is the hallmark of a true professional.

Subroto Bagchi

#40. People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

Edmund Burke

#41. Those in power are so afraid of losing it, they will do anything to keep the world under their control. Even when 'anything' means ignoring dangerous truths that threaten to grow more powerful the longer they're unaddressed.

Romina Russell

#42. Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous.

William Proxmire

#43. When contemplated in its extreme, almost any power looks dangerous.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#44. Gossip is so dangerous, because it makes you feel like you told the truth. And you did. Just not to the person involved. It scratches that itch, that impulse to tell the truth, but it has no power to transform, and it destroys trust. When

Shauna Niequist

#45. Power is okay, and stupidity is usually harmless. Power and stupidity together are dangerous.

Patrick Rothfuss

#46. It is noble to pity a man who is cruel because he is weak, but it is idiotic and dangerous to allow him to have power.

Kate Horsley

#47. Elder Prest was the most dangerous man I'd ever known. Not because he could kill me whenever he chose, but because he had the power to steal so much more than just my life. He could steal my heart.

Pepper Winters

#48. In the wrong hands," Leto said, "monolithic centralized power is a dangerous and volatile instrument." - "And your hands are the right ones?

Frank Herbert

#49. When the reality of power has been surrendered, it's playing a dangerous game to seek to retain the appearance of it; the external aspect of vigor can sometimes support a debilitated body, but most often it manages to deal it the final blow.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#50. Kord sees power as something to satisfy his desires, instead of a tool to protect and serve the people beholden to him. It's a stupid attitude, and it will eventually get him killed - but until then it makes him dangerous.

Jim Butcher

#51. The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessary than liberty but more dangerous.

Bernard Bailyn

#52. If a single nutty or dangerous vision comes to be sufficiently widely shared, demagogues may be able to ride it to power.

Christopher H. Achen

#53. The exercise of power is a dangerous delight.

Iris Murdoch

#54. He had learned that close-held secrets could often be cracked by going all the way to the top and there making himself unbearably unpleasant. He knew that such twisting of the tiger's tail was dangerous, for he understood the psychopathology of great power.

Robert A. Heinlein

#55. Those who want to "spread the wealth" almost invariably seek to concentrate the power. It happens too often, and in too many different countries around the world, to be a coincidence. Which is more dangerous, inequalities of wealth or concentrations of power?

Thomas Sowell

#56. It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no moral element enters.

Victor Hugo

#57. Whisper a dangerous secret to someone you care about. Now they have the power to destroy you, but they won't. This is what love is.

Cecil Baldwin

#58. I'm not a big believer in the power of more regulation to fix things. I think it can almost be more dangerous because it provides the illusion that things have been fixed without the substance.

Bethany McLean

#59. There is nothing in the world so dangerous, or so overwhelming as stupidity; perhaps there is no more of it now than there has been at any time, but I do not think the witless of past generations had so much power. The powers of darkness are the powers of misdirected knowledge.

Gwethalyn Graham

#60. Congress should ban advertising that preys upon children, it should stop subsidizing dead-end jobs, it should pass tougher food safety laws, it should protect American workers from serious harm, it should fight against dangerous concentrations of economic power.

Eric Schlosser

#61. Only when you are dangerous are you truly equal to the world.

Daniel Hecht

#62. The only thing more dangerous then your enemy knowing how powerful you are, is your enemy not knowing how powerful you are.

Joshua Teya

#63. The main reason to be opposed to political control of smoking is to keep power -even the smallest and silliest kind of power - out of the hands of ... members of a dangerous class -the class that knows what's good for us better than we do.

P. J. O'Rourke

#64. Democracy, which began by liberating man politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion.

Ludwig Lewisohn

#65. A small amount of power corrupts a small man absolutely. A little knowledge is dangerous to a little man. To a great man only great knowledge is dangerous.

Leonard J. V. Compagno

#66. The problem with American power is not that it is American. The problem is simply the power. It would be dangerous even for an archangel to wield so much power.

Timothy Garton Ash

#67. It's like how science fiction in the '50s was a way of talking about war without actually having to risk any political capital. The obvious metaphor is power and powerlessness, but I also think it's a way of experimenting with dangerous feelings in a safe arena and trying things out.

Margaret Stohl

#68. People are dangerous. If they're able to involve themselves in issues that matter, they may change the distribution of power, to the detriment of those who are rich and privileged.

Noam Chomsky

#69. The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.

Sarah Vowell

#70. Certainty without power can be interesting, even amusing. Certainty with power can be dangerous.

Donald Rumsfeld

#71. As the global powers diverge and Europe is caught in the middle, the lack of hard power will matter more and more. Being rich and weak is a dangerous combination. Europe therefore lives in a world of wolves.

George Friedman

#72. When you have a person in power who punishes people for speaking their mind, it's truly dangerous.

Tim Robbins

#73. Power is a dangerous game

Victoria Aveyard

#74. There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.

Hunter S. Thompson

#75. Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

Thomas Sowell

#76. Government is never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us blinds us to its great power to harm us.

Ronald Reagan

#77. Not in all ways (of course), but the animals you know have power: they have abilities humans lack, could be dangerous, could bring life, mean things that mean things.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#78. Taboos on the human heart are more dangerous than any risk we run by using our emotions. Sensation is the life of man; it is his actual energy. To suppress it is to lose creative power!

Phyllis Bottome

#79. Power is dangerous unless you have humility.

Richard J. Daley

#80. Every dollar spent on nuclear is one less dollar spent on clean renewable energy and one more dollar spent on making the world a comparatively dirtier and a more dangerous place, because nuclear power and nuclear weapons go hand in hand.

Mark Z. Jacobson

#81. Be suspicious of people who have, or crave, power. Never, ever go near power. Don't become friends with anyone who has real power. It's dangerous.

Stanley Kubrick

#82. The four words of power. Obey, Kill, Protect, and Die. Words so primal, so dangerous, so powerful that they commanded the raw magic itself.

Ilona Andrews

#83. This was life on the surface of the sea. A calm, placid exterior that could soothe you into submission or swell up and kill you with no notice; beneath it always a dangerous world of life and death.

Kenneth Eade

#84. The ascent to greatness, however steep and dangerous, may entertain an active spirit with the consciousness and exercise of its own power: but the possession of a throne could never yet afford a lasting satisfaction to an ambitious mind.

Edward Gibbon

#85. In all of my books, I'm taking them on an emotionally challenging and sometimes physically dangerous process with a bit of fun and anarchy along the way. With the power comes responsibility.

Morris Gleitzman

#86. I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, 'Give, give.'

Abigail Adams

#87. It's ridiculous that time and time again we need a radioactive cloud coming out of a nuclear power-station to remind us that atomic energy is extraordinarily dangerous.

Pierre Schaeffer

#88. A fool is very dangerous when in power.

Denis Fonvizin

#89. A good judge should never boast of his power, because he can do nothing but what he can do justly: he is not the master, but the minister of the law. Authority without virtue is a very dangerous state.

Thomas F. Wilson

#90. I hold it to be the most monstrous proposition ever uttered within the Senate that conquering a country like Mexico, the President can constitute himself a despotic ruler without the slightest limitation on his power. If all this be true, war is indeed dangerous!

John C. Calhoun

#91. Reaching was a dangerous thing: it indicated longing. Longing was dangerous because it indicated need. Need was exploited, need was abused, need was someone else's power over what they could touch.

Enee N. Altson

#92. Power is a dangerous thing. Be careful that you don't abuse it or let it make a tyrant of you.

Louisa May Alcott

#93. A standing army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the liberties of the people. Such power should be watched with a jealous eye.

Samuel Adams

#94. Stephen Harper is probably the most dangerous human being ever elevated to power in Canada.

Farley Mowat

#95. Power is a dangerous games

Victoria Aveyard

#96. Government's power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us.

Thomas Sowell

#97. Crystal then read the red sticker out loud, "Dangerous, do not open." We both stared at each other for a moment. I was trying to figure out why a dumb book about power was dangerous

Dominic Tomasi

#98. Taking power away from a man is a dangerous thing. Someone always pays.

Glenn Close

#99. 'Fair' is one of the most dangerous concepts in politics. Since no two people are likely to agree on what is 'fair,' this means that there must be some third party with power - the government - to impose its will. The road to despotism is paved with 'fairness'.

Thomas Sowell

#100. The power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.

Elizabeth Bowen