Top 100 Quotes About Political Power
#1. Politics is noble; it is one of the highest forms of charity, as Paul VI used to say. We sully it when we mix it with business. The relationship between the Church and political power can also be corrupted if common good is not the only converging point.
Pope Francis
#3. He is a free man, not because is in a poition of political power and influence that you will never be able to achieve, and not because he has more character and heart in his fingertip than you have in your entire being, but because he is a man, and is thus entitled to be free.
Evan Meekins
#4. All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.
Frank Chodorov
#5. Separation of church and state cannot mean an absolute separation between moral principles and political power.
Edward Kennedy
#6. As for the Pope, I am too old to be frightened by his shadow, and am quite sure his shadow or Substance will do less harm to the liberties of my country than will a party, who seek to acquire political power by exciting religious bigotry in the minds of their duped followers.
Ezra Cornell
#7. The human race will have no respite from evils until those who are really philosophers acquire political power or until, through some divine dispensation, those who rule and have political authority in the cities become real philosophers.
Plato
#8. A sect, incidentally, is a religion with no political power.
Thomas Wolfe
#9. It's not possible for two countries to be the leading dominant political power at the same time.
Fareed Zakaria
#10. Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political power.
Rollo May
#11. Sometimes people with strong ideology, whether left-wing or right-wing, refuse to do something simply because they believe it is wrong, when doing it actually benefits them. For some people, it's not just about money and political power.
Ha-Joon Chang
#12. You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy.
Robert Caro
#13. Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.
Charlie Munger
#14. The whole community of people with disabilities was alive, politically alive. I give Justin Dart credit for that. He traveled to every state in the country. He really made people with disabilities understand that they had some political power.
Major Owens
#15. For a very long time, and among a large number of peoples, political power has belonged to the owners of the land.
Vilfredo Pareto
#16. My adult mind says that the really interesting bit of LOTR must have been what happened afterwards - the troubles of a war-ravaged continent, the Marshall Aid scheme for Mordor, the shift in political power, the democratization of Minas
Anonymous
#17. It is not a scientific proposition to determine that some cultures lack political power because they show nothing similar to what is found in our culture. It is instead the sign of a certain conceptual poverty.
Pierre Clastres
#18. While the Christian faith clearly teaches that believers are to be involved as good citizens in the state, nevertheless, it is obvious why so many secularists are addicted to politics because political power is a surrogate for a Higher Power.
J.P. Moreland
#19. The real danger of democracy is, that the classes which have the power under it will assume all the rights and reject all the duties-that is, that they will use the political power to plunder those-who-have.
William Graham Sumner
#20. There must be an end to white monopoly on political power, and a fundamental restructuring of our political and economic systems to ensure that the inequalities of apartheid are addressed and our society thoroughly democratized.
Nelson Mandela
#21. Political power means the capacity to regulate national life through national representatives.
Mahatma Gandhi
#22. Truth has always been relative in China, but political power has not, they say, and the same is still true today.
Rob Gifford
#23. In fact, the entire nature of this State seemed to highlight that political power was just an illusion provided to engage and excite us
Brandon Sanderson
#24. The only sure way to stop excessive risk taking on Wall Street so you don't risk losing your job, or your savings or your home, is to put an end to the excessive economic and political power of Wall Street by busting up the big banks.
Robert Reich
#25. I've always had a Marxist understanding of history: democracy is a result of a broad modernization process that happens in every country. Neocons think the use of political power can force the pace of change, but ultimately it depends on societies doing it themselves.
Francis Fukuyama
#26. The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth.
Wendell Berry
#27. By the very nature of government schooling, the matter of what goes into school textbooks must necessarily be a political matter, to be decided by those I political power.
Jacob G. Hornberger
#28. We who didn't inherit political power nor are made to acquire riches like nothing better than that which expands and solidifies the power of the spirit.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#29. I've got three little kids at home, and I'm trying to save this country from itself. I'm not here to play political power games, and I've had enough of people playing political power games, and this has just gone on too long.
Devin Nunes
#30. But you know, General, Jesus never came to establish a government upon the people by force. He did not even talk about political systems. He came to rule in the hearts of people, and not by the establishment of political power. He asks to live in you, not to control your state.
Ravi Zacharias
#31. We have but to remember man's natural tendency to satisfy his desires with the minimum of effort to realize how political power will be utilized.
Frank Chodorov
#32. The advancement of freedom is not a matter of who wields political power over creative actions; rather, it depends upon the disassembling of such power.
Leonard Read
#33. At the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful - now he is powerful because he has money. Intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy is the completed equating of money with political power.
Oswald Spengler
#34. Are we prepared to take on the enormous political power of the billionaire class or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy?
Bernie Sanders
#35. Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. 'Corporation' is just the most recent name for it.
Daniel Suarez
#36. To create a State and give it the power of life and death does not solve the problem of human evil. It merely transforms the shallow desire for easy property to the bottomless lust for political power.
Stefan Molyneux
#37. You will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power.
Karl Marx
#38. See, because being Coll is obviously the most important thing on earth. It's more important than getting a job, or having a girlfriend, or political power, or money, because all those things are predicated by Coolness. They happen because of it. They depend on it.
Ned Vizzini
#39. Legitimacy is the elixir of political power. "The strongest is never strong enough to be the master", Jean-Jaques Rousseau observed, "unless he translates strength into right and obedience into duty". Only democracy has that authority in the world today.
Fareed Zakaria
#40. Political power does not rest with those who cast votes; political power rests with those who count votes.
Joseph Stalin
#41. President Obama compared himself to Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in the struggle to bring about change. The comparison is flawed. They spent years in jail before taking political power, while politicians from Chicago do it the other way around.
Argus Hamilton
#42. You must make women count as much as men; you must have an equal standard of morals; and the only way to enforce that is through giving women political power so that you can get that equal moral standard registered in the laws of the country. It is the only way.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#43. Russia - having sat across the table from Vladimir Putin, it's pretty clear when you meet him that he has an almost limitless ambition for power. And he's been very good at acquiring it - political power, economic power, military power, territorial power.
Carly Fiorina
#44. The fate of hundreds of thousands of species on this planet may be decided in the next decade. To slow the rush to extinction, we need to achieve real, substantive political power, and we need to get there fast.
Eban Goodstein
#45. It may come as a surprise to some academics, but there is a marked relationship between economic power and political power.
Michael Pare
#46. So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power.
Frederick Jackson Turner
#47. Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.
Charles Krauthammer
#48. There is not one politician in Burundi who would not murder another for the sake of one hour of political power.
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah
#49. The sanctification of political power by Christianity is blasphemy; it is the negation of Christianity.
Leo Tolstoy
#50. When economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny.
John Adams
#51. The supremacy of Parliament and the embedding of property rights in Common Law put political power in the hands of men anxious to exploit the new economic opportunities and provided the framework for a judicial system to protect and encourage productive economic activity
Douglass North
#52. The church is not a political power; it's not a party, but it's a moral power.
Pope Benedict XVI
#53. Islam has some of the best defenses against other god viruses and has the potential to be more parasitically aggressive when consolidating political power with a society.
Darrel Ray
#54. I personally believe that those who are leaders with political power over the world will be forced some day, sooner or later, to give way to common sense and the will of the people.
Alva Myrdal
#55. Humans should not worship other humans at all, but if they must do so it is better that the worshipped ones do not occupy any positions of political power.
Christopher Hitchens
#56. Political power intoxicates the best hearts. No man is wise enough, nor good enough, to be trusted with much political power.
Hans F. Sennholz
#57. Contrary to popular opinion, the Constitution was not - and is not - a grant of rights to the citizenry. Instead, the Constitution is a "barbed-wire entanglement" designed to interfere with, restrict, and impede government officials in the exercise of political power.
Jacob G. Hornberger
#58. Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?
Khalil Gibran
#59. Money is power, and in that government which pays all the public officers of the states will all political power be substantially concentrated.
Andrew Jackson
#60. Generally speaking, the less privileged groups in democratic society, as they become aware of their interests and their political power, will be found to press for ever more state intervention in practically all fields.
Gunnar Myrdal
#61. There is no need, in order to explain three-quarters of the opinions held about people, to go so far as a love that has been spurned or an exclusion from political power. Our judgment remains unsure: an invitation refused or received determines it.
Marcel Proust
#62. People fail to realize there's a difference in kinds of money. There is old money and there is new money. Old money has political power but new money has only purchasing power. (1963)
LIFE Magazine
#63. The political objective of universal capitalism is maximum individual autonomy, the separation of political power wielded by the holders of public office from economic power held by citizens, and the broad diffusion of privately owned economic power.
Louis O. Kelso
#64. Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.
John Locke
#65. In the following years, as the molecular biologists consolidated their political power, their agenda would expand and increasingly prevail; and the needs of the public would continue to be compromised.
Steven Druker
#66. All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party.
Mao Zedong
#67. Our society will always remain an unstable and explosive compound as long as political power is vested in the masses and economic power in the classes. In the end one of these powers will rule. Either the plutocracy will buy up the democracy, or the democracy will vote away the plutocracy.
Irving Fisher
#68. Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.
Milton Friedman
#69. The coal industry is an even larger part of the Australian economy than it is of the American, and it has an enormous amount of political power.
Jeff Goodell
#70. Whether the issue was black political power or nuclear power, Scott-Heron didn't mince words. His comeback record, 'I'm New Here,' doesn't mince words either, but instead of political battles, these songs suggest he's fighting personal ones.
Will Hermes
#71. Do you know what the true basis of political power is? Not guns or troops but the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. By whatever means are appropriate.
Philip K. Dick
#72. It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.
Jose Saramago
#73. This position is untenable, and there can be no pause in the agitation for full political power and responsibility until these are granted to all the women of the nation.
Florence Kelley
#74. Global interconnectedness has led to the emergence of a new political power, that of consumers and their associations. It is good for people to realize that purchasing is always a moral - and not simply economic - act.
Pope Benedict XVI
#75. Civics is not only how to run the country before it's your turn to run the country; it is, in fact, the study of power, practical political power. And you must start that process at an age level when kids' brains are still open and malleable.
Richard Dreyfuss
#76. The people of this country, not special interest big money, should be the source of all political power.
Paul Wellstone
#77. To me, "queerness" is an alienation from a heteronormative code that governs bodies, genders, and their processes - sexuality, birth, death, and inheritance - in order to preserve social, economic, and political power for those who have it [and] to continue it into future generations.
Kazim Ali
#78. Our courts provide a neutral forum for the adjudication of disputes under the law, not based on economic or political power, on race, on sex or any other personal characteristics.
Jon Kyl
#79. America is a knowledge-based society, where information counts as much as material resources. Therefore those with the power to define what qualifies as knowledge - to determine what are the accepted facts - wield the greatest social and political power.
Nancy Pearcey
#80. Whenever the clergy succeeded in conquering political power in any country, the result has been disastrous to the interests of religion and inimical to the progress of humanity.
James Connolly
#81. A Libertarian society of unfettered individualism spreads its benefits to virtually everyone - not just those who have the resources to seize political power.
Harry Browne
#82. [The loss- of-strength gradient is] the degree to which military and political power diminishes as we move a unit distance away from its home base.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#83. Among the most famous of these Supreme Court cases of exercise of political power I believe are the cases of Roe V. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, two 1973 cases based on false statements which created a constitutional right to abortion.
Sam Brownback
#84. If moral truths do not exist as a foundation for law, then law itself becomes merely a system of raw political power accountable to no one.
Scott Klusendorf
#85. I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives.
Robert Caro
#86. I try to do stories that make a difference - stories that affect the way people think, stories that people need to hear - and usually what drives me is to do stories about people who have no voice, people who have no political power, people who are overlooked by society.
Ann Curry
#87. Revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable in class society, and without them it is impossible to accomplish any leap in social development and to overthrow the reactionary ruling classes and therefore impossible for the people to win political power.
Mao Zedong
#88. The question of whether one has one's own political power or goes to work for someone else is not only a feminist question.
Gloria Steinem
#89. Unequal access to money and media plus bias, external and internalized, and male-dominant religions and illegality at the polls - all those are reasons for women's wildly unequal political power.
Gloria Steinem
#90. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
Henry A. Wallace
#91. At EMILY's List, we're in the business of expanding the political power of women.
Ellen Malcolm
#92. There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.
Karl Popper
#93. It is not the qualified voters, but the qualified voters who choose to vote, that constitute political power.
Abraham Lincoln
#94. Anyone in England who puts himself forward to be elected to a position of political power is almost bound to be socially or emotionally insecure, or criminally motivated, or mad.
Auberon Waugh
#95. We live in a time when complex ethical questions are easily subordinated to the demands of efficiency, profit maximization, and maintenance or furthering of political power.
Randal Marlin
#96. Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.
Garrett Hardin
#97. It's usually pointed out that women are not fit for political power, and ought not to be trusted with a vote because they are politically ignorant, socially prejudiced, narrow-minded, and selfish. True enough, but precisely the same is true of men!
George Bernard Shaw
#98. The church, inserted and active in human society and in history, does not exist in order to exercise political power or to govern the society.
Claudio Hummes
#99. We must recognize that we can't solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power ... a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#100. Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.
Rudolph Rummel
