Top 67 Quotes About The Desire For Power
#1. People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self.
Eric Hoffer
#3. What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#4. When you feel the desire for power, you should stay in solitude for some time
Leo Tolstoy
#5. If you knew the power within yourself to be truly happy, to be truly whole, then you would never ask another to become the image you desire for yourself, in order to be happy and whole.
Stephen Richards
#6. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
Henry David Thoreau
#7. The will to power, the force of desire, appears as an insensitive urge to dominate. But several points in Nietzsche's work speak against such a reading. The "self" includes the desire above all for self-overcoming. It is our own limits we most seek to break.
Karmen MacKendrick
#8. I don't care for the applause one gets by saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change people's thoughts. Power over people's minds is the main personal desire of my life; and this sort of power is not acquired by saying popular things.
Bertrand Russell
#9. The State is a collection of officials, different for difference purposes, drawing comfortable incomes so long as the status quo is preserved. The only alteration they are likely to desire in the status quo is an increase of bureaucracy and the power of bureaucrats.
Bertrand Russell
#10. Humans may progress. They may think that they are moving forward because they have invented clever machines and because they control the land and sea. But man's capacity to inflict and endure pain is constant. Man's desire for power, to beat down his competition - it hasn't changed in the slightest.
Gemma Malley
#12. Marx did not recognize that our desire to connect with a transcendent power runs even deeper than our drive for economic satisfaction. Each of us seeks. How we honor each other's search will tell the tale of the next millennium.
Jeffrey Klein
#13. The desire to engineer humanity is a sign of a mind warped by megalomania and lust for power.
A.E. Samaan
#14. Plant the seed of desire in your mind and it forms a nucleus with power to attract to itself everything needed for its fulfillment.
Robert Collier
#15. A man's not doing much until the cause he works for possesses all there is of him. Desire, when harnessed, is power.
John Wanamaker
#16. O Divine Providence, I ask not for more riches but more wisdom with which to make wiser use of the riches you gave me at birth, consisting in the power to control and direct my own mind to whatever ends I might desire.
Napoleon Hill
#18. for your part, do not desire to be a general, or a senator, or a consul, but to be free; and the only way to this is a disregard of things which lie not within our own power.
Epictetus
#19. On Power:
It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal.
Helen Keller
#20. Every person has the power to change their fate if they are brave enough to fight for what they desire more than anything.
Stephanie Garber
#21. Love spells are nothing but wives' tales. You can't play magic inside the heart, for it's more powerful than any spell. Lust you can order up with a wink, desire with a smile. But love is love, and there is nothing can touch it.
Nora Roberts
#22. Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#23. I prefer death in Christ Jesus to power over the farthest limits of the earth. He who died in place of us is the one object of my quest. He who rose for our sakes is my one desire.
Ignatius Of Antioch
#24. Those who criticize. They desire our blood, not our pain. But still I must achieve. I must seek truth in all things. I must endure for the Power I was sent forth. For the world. For the children. But have mercy, for Ive been bleeding a long time now.
Michael Jackson
#25. God knows our crooked places that need to be made straight, the wounds in our hearts that fester for years unhealed, the broken pieces of our lives that seem beyond repair. And He who is the author of miracles has infinite desire as well as power to heal them all.
Marianne Williamson
#26. In men of the highest character and noblest genius there is to be found an insatiable desire for honor, command, power, and glory.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#27. It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.
Marya Hornbacher
#28. 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
#29. Use the power of your conscious & subconscious mind to create a vibrational match for the abundance you desire and deserve.
Jack Canfield
#30. It is axiomatic that the attempt to become a Sufi through a desire for personal power as normally understood will not succeed.
Idries Shah
#31. Now he realized ... now he knew why the Empire had survived because of the game; Azad itself simply produced an insatiable desire for more victories, more power, more territory, more dominance ...
Iain M. Banks
#32. I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
Thomas Hobbes
#33. But I have no desire for fame and power anymore. I crawled out of the swamp and I'm not crawling back in.
George W. Bush
#34. Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with a habit.
Bertrand Russell
#35. Bob Gates has unusual standing in the debate about the Obama administration's foreign policy: He was defense secretary for both a hawkish President George W. Bush and a wary President Obama. He understood Bush's desire to project power and Obama's skepticism.
David Ignatius
#36. Desire for power is a kind of greed indulged by the unfulfilled
Michael Foley
#37. And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard
#38. My kind do not spend their days at craft or art. Our deepest desire is not for the making of a thing, nor for the thing itself. Rather, we thrive on the skills of those who make. We steal that time and that power, and we turn it to our own souls, and that is how we grow.
E.K. Johnston
#39. The desire to have power dissolves. The desire to dominate people for love dissolves. On the other hand, it's a relief to realize you can let go.
Allen Ginsberg
#40. The leaders use their power to crush people's natural desire to think for themselves. It's foot binding for the brain.
Haruki Murakami
#41. I think the whole student rebellion is not really a rebellion at all....They want a certain kind of identity; they're jockeying with each other for political power in their own culture. The basis for this behavior is a desire for notoriety.
Truman Capote
#42. Capitalists desire purchasing power. Socialists lust for the power to plan society. Which is worse?
A.E. Samaan
#43. For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world ...
Audre Lorde
#44. When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.
King Samuel Benson
#45. For in general mortals have a great power of being astonished at the presence of an effect toward which they have done everything, and at the absence of an effect toward which they had done nothing but desire it.
George Eliot
#46. You must lay aside your greed; have no unworthy motive in your desire to become rich and powerful. It is legitimate and right to desire riches, if you want them for the sake of your soul, but not if you desire them for the lists of the flesh.
Wallace D. Wattles
#47. The universe is infinite, so there is room for everyone, for every belief, for every custom, and for every desire. You are in competition with no one but yourself.
Stephen Richards
#48. Everything in the world of soul has a deep desire and longing for visible form; this is exactly where the power of the imagination lives.
John O'Donohue
#49. There are men who desire power simply for the sake of the happiness it will bring; these belong chiefly to political parties.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#50. The original American patriots were those individuals brave enough to resist with force the oppressive power of King George ... Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security.
Ron Paul
#51. The power of one fair face makes my love sublime, for it has weaned my heart from low desires.
Michelangelo
#52. But at power or wealth, for the sake of which wars, and all kinds of strife, arise among mankind, we do not aim; we desire only our liberty, which no honorable man relinquishes but with his life.
Sallust
#53. People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person's faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.
Sam Harris
#54. What we will criticize 'modern' eroticism for is its lack of genuine sensuality, a sensuality which implies beauty or charm, passion or modesty, power over the object of desire, and fulfilment.
Henri Lefebvre
#55. Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation.
William O. Douglas
#56. Whatever you desire, it comes from the universe, and whatever you manifest, be it situations, the right partner, friend, or spouse, the right pet, anything at all, IS the universe, for the universe IS everything.
Stephen Richards
#57. Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?
Marya Hornbacher
#58. Some come to a teacher for power. They still have all the desires, angers and jealousies of an unevolved person. Consequently, they become destructive both to themselves and to others.
Frederick Lenz
#59. The United States invented the Internet and it has been our gift to the world, paid for by our taxpayers. The U.N.'s desire to take that gift as a means of increasing its power must be stopped.
John Doolittle
#60. The growth of property and the desire for its transmission to children was, in reality, the moving power which brought in monogamy to insure legitimate heirs, and to limit their number to the actual progeny of the married pair.
Lewis Henry Morgan
#61. Destroy desire completely for the present. For if you desire anything which is not in our power, you must be unfortunate
Epictetus
#62. How can you consider flower power outdated? The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That's all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated?
Robert Plant
#63. There is a great force in renunciation of power that those who are blinded by the lust for domination cannot understand because those who truly love do not desire power.
Alison Croggon
#64. But the only measure that he knows is desire desire for power and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this we shall put him out of reckoning.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#65. The (narcissitic) rage may turn into, or be accompanied by, a cold hatred that gives her qualities of power, invincibility, and calculation. This hatred underlies the desire for vengeance, for wanting to inflict pain and suffering, and for actually enjoying getting back at the person who failed her.
A.H. Almaas
#66. Grace is the divine assistance or heavenly help each of us desperately needs to qualify for the celestial kingdom. Thus, the enabling power of the Atonement strengthens us to do and be good and to serve beyond our own individual desire and natural capacity.
David A. Bednar
#67. Miracles can only inhabit the reality of our awareness when we surrender our need for the familiar to our desire for the limitless.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal
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