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Never doubt what small men will do for great power.
PAOLO BACIGALUPI, The Windup Girl
We never get far from wealth and all of its masks when we deal with power.
FRANK HERBERT, Children of Dune
Beware the power of the pajama-clad, Cheeto-eating, twitter, blogging hordes. We are legion!
RACHEL MADDOW, The Rachel Maddow Show, May 4, 2009
Power deludes the ones who wield it.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON, Dune: House Harkonnen
All governments suffer a redurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.
FRANK HERBERT, Chapterhouse: Dune
Men in power are always interested in greater power.
DAN BROWN, The Lost Symbol
One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.
FRANK HERBERT, Children of Dune
Power revealed is power sacrificed.... The truly powerful exert their influence in ways unseen, unfelt. Some would say that a thing visible is a thing vulnerable.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO & CHUCK HOGAN, The Fall
If you are born to power, you must prove you deserve it through good works -- or give it up. To do any less is to act without conscience.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON, Dune: House Atreides
Unused power was like a marionette with visible strings, nobody holding them. A compelling attraction: I could make it dance.
FRANK HERBERT, Chapterhouse: Dune
An empire built on power cannot attract the affections and loyalty that men bestow willingly on a regime of ideas and beauty.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON, Dune: House Harkonnen
If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Neverÿon
The greatest sin a man or woman can commit is the abuse of power.
JOE BIDEN, Esquire, Jan. 2012
Many have turned an eager ear to the siren call of power--and found themselves drowning insead.
ROY THOMAS & CLARA NOTO, Red Sonja, vol. 1, no. 3
By power… I do not understand a general system of domination exercised by one element or one group over another, whose effects… traverse the entire body social… It seems to me that first what needs to be understood is the multiplicity of relations of force that are immanent to the domain wherein they are exercised, and that are constitutive of its organization; the game that through incessant struggle and confrontation transforms them, reinforces them, inverts them; the supports these relations of force find in each other, so as to form a chain or system, or, on the other hand, the gaps, the contradictions that isolate them from each other; in the end, the strategies in which they take effect, and whose general pattern or institutional crystallization is embodied in the mechanisms of the state, in the formulation of the law, in social hegemonies. The condition of possibility of power… should not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique space of sovereignty whence would radiate derivative and descendent forms; it is the moving base of relations of force that incessantly induce, by their inequality, states of power, but always local and unstable. Omnipresence of power: not at all because it regroups everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced at every instant, at every point, or moreover in every relation between one point and another. Power is everywhere: not that it engulfs everything, but that it comes from everywhere.
MICHEL FOUCAULT, History of Sexuality
The natural destiny of power is fragmentation.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON, Dune: House Corrino
Power is all. Another falsification; I do not tell how I gain or maintain it. I only record the ginger stroll through the vaguely fetid garden of its rewards.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Dhalgren
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