Tao Te Ching
Nicholas Roerich
Power
Quotes (124)
“When yang has reached its greatest strength, the dark power of yin is born within its depths; night begins at midday when yang breaks up and begins to change into yin.”
“He was a rebel, a troublemaker. They say he died for your sins but that is not the truth. He refused to be cowed, controlled. And now look at the power he wields, the worship he commands.”
“Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant or an enemy, must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves.”
“Those who would take over the world never succeed... The wise never over-reach, over-spend, or over-rate.”
“Chasing fame, fortune, pleasure and power only drives us crazy.”
“Only those not seduced and controlled by something external will remain unmanipulated, uncorrupted by power.”
“Don’t chase after fame, fortune, pleasure and power; but instead, find true joy.”
“Protecting ourselves against defeat is in our own hands; the opportunity of defeating the enemy is in theirs.”
“Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.”
“Absolute power is universally coveted, though all know that an absolute ruler has an anxious life and usually a violent death.”
“Those who labor with their mind-and-hearts govern others; those who labor with their strength are governed by others. Those who are governed provide for others, those who govern are provided for by others.”
“Sages do not need authority to be noble, do not need wealth to be rich, and do not need power to be strong. Peaceful and empty, they are not subject to outside influences; they fly freely with evolution.”
“In a republic this rule ought to be observed: that the majority should not have the predominant power.”
“There is no stronger test of a man's real character than power and authority, exciting as they do every passion and discovering every latent vice.”
“Except for extreme physical abuse, other people cannot hurt you unless you allow them to... Don't consent to be hurt and you won't be hurt—this is a choice over which you have control.”
“Transform the lust for power and riches into the desire to relate to all beings, destroy every demon that enters your mind.”
“Hold fast to the primal and guard the One—it guards true power and can prolong the span of life.”
“The mundane power of gods is delusory for they still retain the notion of self.”
“The wealth that comes from giving generously is inexhaustible. The power that arises from not accumulating is boundless”
“through compassion, we learn to be soft. When we are soft, we can overcome the hardest thing in the world.”
“If where you stand is reality, then your actions have power... it is there, pure and naked and full of life.”
“It is not by being richer or more powerful that a man becomes better; one is a matter of fortune, the other of virtue.”
“Be as gentle as caressing an infant and atop the mountain, thunder will shake the earth.”
“When the government leaves power with the people… makes no demands, the people respond with openness instead of deception. When the government makes demands, the people use every means to escape.”
“There is nothing more inglorious than that glory that is gained by war.”
“It is a strange desire to seek a Power that loses our liberty, a power over others that makes us lose power over ourselves. Those in high positions lose their freedom and become slaves to the state, to fame, and to business.”
“O how feeble is man's power, That if good fortune fall, Cannot add another hour, Nor a lost hour recall!”
“In the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ends only in death.”
“Let there be no unnecessary expenditure of either knowledge or power… too much display today and there will be nothing to show tomorrow.”
“Arbitrary power is the natural object of temptation to a prince, as wine and women to a young fellow, or a bribe to a judge, or avarice to old age, or vanity to a woman.”
“The Inquisition is well known to be an admirable and truly Christian invention for increasing the power of the popes and monks, and rendering the population of a whole kingdom hypocrites.”
“It is belied by all history and experience that the people are the origins of all just power.”
“I may be kindly, I am ordinarily gentle, but in my line of business I am obliged to will terribly what I will at all.”
“competitiveness and desire for power are the beginnings of beckoning disaster in business and social relations.”
“It was the first care of the senate to dissolve those dangerous confederacies which taught mankind that, as the Roman arms prevailed by division, they might be resisted by union.”
“In human life the most important scenes will depend upon the character of a single actor... An acrimonious humor falling upon a single fiber of one man my prevent or suspend the misery of nations.”
“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.”
“Remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”
“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves. If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?”
“Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man’s power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.”
“The continuation of authority in the same person has frequently proved the undoing of democratic governments. Repeated elections are essential to the system of popular governments, because there is nothing so dangerous as to suffer Power to be vested for a long time in one citizen. The people become accustomed to obeying him, and he becomes accustomed to commanding, hence the origin of usurpation and tyranny.”
“Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes what'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame”
“Nothing else in the world—not all the armies— is so powerful as an idea whose times has come... An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot”
“when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power. As none of them is strong enough to fight alone with advantage, the only guarantee of liberty is for everyone to combine forces.”
“The ideally best form of government is that in which the sovereignty or supreme controlling power is vested in the entire aggregate of the community.”
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”
“There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.”
“When our hearts grow soft with infinite, universal, unquenchable love and we realize that each one of us is responsible for all of mankind and for every individual person, we will have the power to win over the whole world.”
“Without hypocrisy, lying, punishments, prisons, fortresses and murders, no new power can arise and no existing one hold its own... thus efforts to get it are not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, craft and cruelty.”
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men...”
“Concentrated power can be always wielded in the interest of the few and at the expense of the many. Government in its last analysis is this power reduced to a science. Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.”
“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.”
“Government is founded on property, property is founded on conquest, and conquest is founded on Power.”
“It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear... it never occurred to him that the lust for power, with which he endows his superman, is itself an outcome of fear.”
“It is this radiance in women, more than any other quality, that urges men to every sort of heroism, be it martial or poetic... Woman possesses the power of perpetually creating in man the qualities she desires, and this is for her an infinitely grater power than the possession of those special qualities could ever confer upon her directly.”
“The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”
“Spare me the political events and power struggles, as the whole earth is my homeland and all men are my fellow countrymen.”
“Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.”
“Progress in knowledge, science, comforts, and power is only progress in means; if there is no improvement in ends, purposes, or desires, progress is a delusion.”
“I have not come into this world to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses.”
“As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.”
“we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes… Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.”
“The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband’s bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.”
“Of all social, moral, and spiritual problems, that of power is the most chronically urgent and the most difficult of solution... Growing with every successive satisfaction, the appetite for power can manifest itself indefinitely”
“Traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.”
“Look at the world today… What madness there is! What blindness! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity crashing headlong against each other. The time must come, my friend, when brutality and the lust for power must perish by its own sword. For when that day comes, the world must begin to look for a new life. And it is our hope that they may find it here.”
“He directs the destiny of the nations, but he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes.”
“a clown is somebody sacred, funny, powerful, ridiculous holy, shameful, visionary. He is all this and then some more... He has a power, more power than the atom bomb”
“Nationalism is inseparable from the desire for power... power hunger tempered by self-deception.”
“The power of life causes the snake to shed its skin, just as the moon sheds its shadow. The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon its shadow to be born again. They are equivalent symbols.”
“What is true is that the idea of power corrupts. Power corrupts most rapidly those who believe in it, and it is they who will want it most. Obviously, our democratic system tends to give power to those who hunger for it and gives every opportunity to those who don’t want power to avoid getting it. Not a very satisfactory arrangement if power corrupts those who believe in it and want it.”
“But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.”
“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.”
“The Stoics thought that the attainment of these solutions was in the power of any man who set himself to live according to reason.”
“If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them.”
“Reserved as he [Confucius] was about the supernatural, he was not without it; somewhere in the universe there was a power that was on the side of right.”
“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
“Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.”
“By his silence Jesus recognizes power that is established as 'devil' and defines Himself as The Powerless. He who cannot accept this view on power cannot look at establishments through the spectacle of the Gospel. This is what clergy and churches often have difficulty doing.”
“Lao Tzu sees rightful power as earned and wrongful power as usurped. He does not see power as virtue, but as the result of virtue. The democracies are founded on that view.”
“No President can be great, or even fit for office, if he attempts to accommodate to injustice to maintain his political balance... it was this same attitude that made it possible for Lincoln to speak a kind word about the South during the Civil War when feeling was most bitter. Asked by a shocked bystander how he could do this, Lincoln said, 'Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?' This is the power of redemptive love.”
“‘doing without doing’: uncompetitive, unworried, trustful accomplishment, power that is not force. An example or analogy might be a very good teacher, or the truest voice in a group of singers.”
“Power expressed without foresight always returns eventually, reverses confidence into pathetic impotence.”
“If anything appears to be a permanent feature of reality it is power — the constant impingement on us of superior forces both without and within. Everything from changes in the weather and acts of national governments to the irresistible push of instinct and the process of aging”
“All dictators, irrespective of epoch or country, have one common trait: they know everything, are experts on everything.”
“The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - and so destroys democracy.”
“I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.”
“If you are willing to make a fool out of yourself, an absolutely perfects fool, then you get to be president.”
“For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Do what they do just to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.”
“music has the power to transform people, and in doing so… to transform situations”
“Too many problem-solving sessions become battlegrounds where decisions are made based on power rather than intelligence.”
“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”
“Never before or since have women [the daughters of Genghis Khan] exercised so much power over so many people and ruled so much territory for a long as these women did.”
“Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations”
“You can imprison a person, but not an idea. You can exile a person, but not an idea. You can kill a person, but not an idea.”
“Realizing you’re not king can be the first step toward getting some real power.”
“Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul.”
“In spite of their wealth and power, they swim in an ocean of pain, which is sometimes so deep that suicide seems the only escape. Such intense pain results from believing that objects or situations can create lasting happiness.”
“We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power... Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.”
“As a species, humans prefer power to truth... Truth and power can travel together only so far. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions... whether Christian priests, Confucian mandarins, or Communist ideologues—placed unity above truth. That's why they were so powerful.”
“At the heart of fear is uncertainty. If he could identify and accept even the worst possible outcome—without losing his resolve to act—he could eliminate uncertainty from the equation. He would strip fear of its power.”
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