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Power

ability to influence the behavior of others

Power is "the possession of control or command over people; authority; influence" or "political ascendancy or control in the government of a country, state, etc."

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men. ~ Lord Acton
In the struggle between those seeking power there is no middle course. ~ Tacitus
It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them. ~ Noam Chomsky
Let us turn our backs on power. ~ Pope Francis
Not in our day, but at no distant one, we may shake a rod over the heads of all, which may make the stoutest of them tremble. But I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power, the greater it will be. ~ Thomas Jefferson
They worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?” ~ John of Patmos
God is not simply power, as most people were inclined to think. God is love, and he manifests himself in the dialectics of an impotent love. ... The emperor is not God. Jesus desacralizes that kind of power and its claim to be the absolute mediation of God. The pax romana is not the kingdom of God. The political organization of Rome might dazzle the world with its power, but it was oppressive; hence there was nothing sacred or divine about it. ... In Jesus' eyes God's ultimate historical word is love, whereas the ultimate historical word of power in the human world is oppression. Jesus' journey to the cross is a trial dealing with the authentic nature of power. ~ Jon Sobrino
Let us, cautious in diction
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully. ~ Martin Buber

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations · Respectfully Quoted · See also · External links

A

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  • Politics is the art of making the people believe that they are in power, when in fact, they have none.
  • Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
  • Power always sincerely, conscientiously, de très bon foi, believes itself right. Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak.
  • Do you think maybe I want power for myself? That’s for fools who want to command other fools.
    • Poul Anderson, The Long Way Home (1978 Ace Books restored edition), Chapter 4

B

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  • The crucial question is whether one is safe in assuming that the immense machinery of power that has resulted from activity of the utilitarian type can be made, on anything like present lines, to serve disinterested ends; whether it will not rather minister to the egoistic aims either of national groups or of individuals.
  • He hath no power that hath not power to use.
  • Sure, it’s abuse of power. What’s the point in power if you can’t abuse it?
  • There are clear and predictable consequences for the world if human beings continue to rape the earth and plunder its resources; to exploit, oppress, and dominate the weak and the poor for the sake of greed and the hunger for power; to depend on ever-rising levels of violence and ever more lethal instruments of death and destruction in order to secure positions of power and privilege.
  • I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.
    • Matthew Boulton, in James Boswell ‘The Life of Samuel Johnson’ (March 22, 1776)

  • Every morning
    I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
    Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
    And pressing forward honor reality.

    We cannot avoid
    Using power,
    Cannot escape the compulsion
    To afflict the world,
    So let us, cautious in diction
    And mighty in contradiction,
    Love powerfully.

  • Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power. … The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his forces, is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit.
  • When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick. He overreaches himself, the work denies itself to him, the incarnation of the spirit no longer takes place, and to avoid the threat of senselessness he snatches after empty power. This sickness casts the genius on to the same level as those hysterical figures who, being by nature without power, slave for power, in order that they may enjoy the illusion that they are inwardly powerful, and who in this striving for power cannot let a pause intervene, since a pause would bring with it the possibility of self-reflection and self-reflection would bring collapse.
  • So long as a man’s power, that is, his capacity to realize what he has in mind, is bound to the goal, to the work, to the calling, it is, considered in itself, neither good nor evil, it is only a suitable or unsuitable instrument. But as soon as this bond with the goal is broken off or loosened, and the man ceases to think of power as the capacity to do something, but thinks of it as a possession, that is, thinks of power in itself, then his power, being cut off and self-satisfied, is evil; it is power withdrawn from responsibility, power which betrays the spirit, power in itself.

C

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  • Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
    • Jesse Carr, head of Teamsters Union Local, in Newsweek, Vol. 88 (1976), p. 77
  • Men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power.
  • It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.
  • A right, in the abstract, is a fact; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never.
  • Who is all-powerful should fear everything.
  • Power expands through the distribution of secrecy.
    • David John Moore Cornwell (John le Carré) (b. 1931), British author and one time spy, interviewed by Pip Ayers in Live magazine, The Mail on (July 10, 2011).

D

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  • Nearest the king, nearest the gallows.
    • Danish proverb, in A Book of Proverbs, edited by Raymond Lamont_Brown (1970), p. 135
  • It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery.
    • Demosthenes, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 455
  • I took my power in my hand
    And went against the world;
    ’T was not so much as David had,
    But I was twice as bold.

    • Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems (1993), Life, p. 33, Fall River Press edition.
  • We have, in truth, resorted to power [in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam] because our politics has failed. Since no politician can afford to admit this, we must pretend that we are resorting to power in order to make our politics succeed.

E

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Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • What elements of power we wield! Truth unmixed with error, flashing as God's own lightning in its brightness, resistless if properly wielded, as that living flame! O what agencies! The Holy Ghost standing and pleading with us to so work that He may help us, the very earth coming to the help of the Lord Jesus Christ. And yet I am painfully impressed that we are not wielding the elements of Christian achievement nearly up to their maximum.
    • T. M. Eddy, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 455.
  • Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
  • Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force.
    • Ralph Waldo Emerson, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 456.

F

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  • Then, everlasting Love, restrain thy will;
    'Tis god-like to have power, but not to kill.
    • John Fletcher, The Chances (c. 1613–25; 1647), Act II, scene 2. Song.
  • One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
  • Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.
  • One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.
  • The analysis [of power] should not attempt to consider power from its internal point of view and...should refrain from posing the labyrinthine and unanswerable question: 'Who then has power and what has he in mind? What is the aim of someone who possesses power?' Instead, it is a case of studying power at the point where its intention, if it has one, is completely invested in its real and effective practices.
  • Let us ask ... how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc....we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.
  • Power is everywhere ... because it comes from everywhere.
    • Michel Foucault, quoted in Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History : From World War II to the Present Day (2001) edited by Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon.
  • Socialism seeks to change society for the sake of the oppressed masses, but is what it would accomplish truly for their welfare? Socialism would create a social upheaval “for the masses,” and the masses would stake their lives in the struggle together with those who had risen up on their behalf. But what would the ensuing change mean for them? Power would be in the hands of the leaders, and the order of the new society would be based on that power. The masses would become slaves allover again to that power. What is revolution, then, but the replacing of one power with another?

F

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Our school systems are all nonsynergetic. We take the whole child and fractionate the scope of his or her comprehending... to become preoccupied with elements or isolated facts only... We may well ask how it happened that the entire scheme of advanced education is devoted exclusively to ever narrower specialization... The historical beginnings of schools and tutoring were established, and economically supported by illiterate and vastly ambitious warlords who required a wide variety of brain slaves with which to logistically and ballistically overwhelm those who opposed their expansion of physical conquest... The warlord made all those about him differentiators and reserved the function of integration to himself. ~ Buckminster Fuller
  • We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. . . . In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding... It has also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.

G

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  • I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.
    • Mahatma Gandhi. Young India (September 15, 1920), reprinted in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 21 (electronic edition), p. 252.
  • The destiny was fulfilled which the father of the gods, Enlil of the mountain, had decreed for Gilgamesh: "In nether-earth the darkness will show him a light: of mankind, all that are known, none will leave a monument for generations to come to compare with his. The heroes, the wise men, like the new moon have their waxing and waning. Men will say, 'Who has ever ruled with might and with power like him?' As in the dark month, the month of shadows, so without him there is no light. O Gilgamesh, this was the meaning of your dream. You were given the kingship, such was your destiny, everlasting life was not your destiny. Because of this do not be sad at heart, do not be grieved or oppressed; he has given you power to bind and to loose, to be the darkness and the light of mankind. He has given unexampled supremacy over the people, victory in battle from which no fugitive returns, in forays and assaults from which there is no going back. But do not abuse this power, deal justly with your servants in the palace, deal justly before the face of the Sun.
  • Could this have just happened? . . . I can’t believe that ... Some Power put all this into orbit and keeps it there.
    • John Glenn, exclaimed regarding the order in the universe. Cited in Awake! magazine 1999, 6/22.

H

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Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters. ~ Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
  • Can humans exist without some people ruling and others being ruled? The founders of political science did not think so. "I put for a general inclination of mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death," declared Thomas Hobbes. Because of this innate lust for power, Hobbes thought that life before (or after) the state was a "war of every man against every man"—"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Was Hobbes right? Do humans have an unquenchable desire for power that, in the absence of a strong ruler, inevitably leads to a war of all against all? To judge from surviving examples of bands and villages, for the greater part of prehistory our kind got along quite well without so much as a paramount chief, let alone the all-powerful English leviathan King and Mortal God, whom Hobbes believed was needed for maintaining law and order among his fractious countrymen.
    • Marvin Harris, Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going (1989)
  • More power than any good man should want, and more power than any other kind of man ought to have.
    • Senator Daniel O. Hastings, remark in the Senate on the power to be given President Franklin D. Roosevelt by the proposed work-relief program, March 23, 1935, Congressional Record (June 18, 1879), vol. 9, p. 2144.
  • When a man in power asks for time to consider anything, it is generally in order that he may be able to consult his immediate inferior, without whose sanction he dares not assent to anything.
  • [P]eople do enjoy power. ... How do people behave behind the wheel of a motorcar? — which is the most power that most people get in their lives. It transforms probably seventy percent of drivers into slavering maniacs — shouting and hooting.
  • The impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.
    • Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change (1963), Ch. 15: The Unnaturalness Of Human Nature.
  • There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutions—to cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
    • Eric Hoffer, "Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely,'" The New York Times Magazine (April 25, 1971), p. 24.
  • The best education will not immunize a person against corruption by power. The best education does not automatically make people compassionate. We know this more clearly than any preceding generation. Our time has seen the best-educated society, situated in the heart of the most civilized part of the world, give birth to the most murderously vengeful government in history.
    Forty years ago the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought it self-evident that you would get a good government if you took power out of the hands of the acquisitive and gave it to the learned and the cultivated. At present, a child in kindergarten knows better than that.
  • we have to invent new images and ways of power. So far the world thinks of power as violence, that power comes from a gun. We must create a new kind of drama in which there is drama, but it's nonviolent. And this has barely been thought of.
    • 1990 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin (1998)
  • Das Wissen, das Macht ist, kennt keine Schranken, weder in der Versklavung der Kreatur noch in der Willfähigkeit gegen die Herren der Welt.

I

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  • Most people can bear adversity; but if you wish to know what a man really is give him power. This is the supreme test. It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power, he never used it except on the side of mercy.
    • Robert G. Ingersoll, (1883), Unity: Freedom, Fellowship and Character in Religion, Volume 11, Number 3, The Exchange Table, True Greatness Exemplified in Abraham Lincoln, by Robert G. Ingersoll (excerpt), Quote Page 55, Column 1 and 2, Chicago, Illinois. (Google Books Full View)
    • v. Miller

J

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  • I wish that all nations may recover and retain their independence; that those which are overgrown may not advance beyond safe measures of power, that a salutary balance may be ever maintained among nations, and that our peace, commerce, and friendship, may be sought and cultivated by all. It is our business to manufacture for ourselves whatever we can, to keep our markets open for what we can spare or want; and the less we have to do with the amities or enmities of Europe, the better. Not in our day, but at no distant one, we may shake a rod over the heads of all, which may make the stoutest of them tremble. But I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.
  • Also, there will be signs in the sun and moon and stars, and on the earth anguish of nations not knowing the way out because of the roaring of the sea and its agitation. People will become faint out of fear and expectation of the things coming upon the inhabited earth, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
  • προσεκύνησαν τῷ θηρίῳ λέγοντες Τίς ὅμοιος τῷ θηρίῳ, καὶ τίς δύναται πολεμῆσαι μετ’ αὐτοῦ;
    • They worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?”
    • John of Patmos, Revelation 13:4
  • Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
    • Carl Jung, The Psychology of the Unconscious (1943).

K

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  • The automatic desire for more power is only apparent in children, primitives, people of low character or intellect; for the superior man, power is like a cross, duty a burden, responsibility an obligation.

L

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Is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have – that is, to secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires? ~ Steven Lukes
  • The possession of great power necessarily implies great responsibility.
    • William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne Hansard, Thomas Curson. "Habeus Corpus Suspension Bill." The Parliamentary Debates From The Year 1803 To The Present Time. Vol. 36. London: T.C. Hansard, 1817. 1127. Print. Parliamentary Debates.
    • Misattributed to Voltaire: Voltaire. Jean, Adrien. Beuchot, Quentin and Miger, Pierre, Auguste. Œuvres de Voltaire, Volume 48. Lefèvre, 1832..
    • The sentiment is also found in Luke 12:48: "from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked" (NIV).
  • Him I would call the powerful one who controls the storms of his mind.
    • Walter S. Landor, “Diogenes and Plato,” Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans, Vol. 4 (1829)
  • It was an old story, and a familiar one. Those who sought freedom were tempted by power instead, and became indistinguishable from those they sought to overthrow.
  • A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does not want to do, but he may also exercise power over him by shaping or determining his very wants. Indeed, is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have – that is, to secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires?

M

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  • [P]ower, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
    • James Madison, speech in the Virginia Constitutional Convention, 2 December 1829, as quoted in The Writings of James Madison: 1819-1836 (1910), ed. Galliard Hunt, p. 361
  • The intoxication with power is worse than drunkenness with liquor and such, for he who is drunk with power does not come to his senses before he falls.
  • Man is insatiable for power; he is infinite in his desires, and, always discontented with what he has, he loves only what he has not. People complain about the despotism of princes; they should complain about that of man. We are all born despots, from the most absolute monarch of Asia to the child who smothers a bird with his hand for the pleasure of seeing something in the world weaker than himself.
  • There is no surer mark of a low and unregenerate nature than this tendency of power to loudness and wantonness instead of quietness and reverence. To souls baptized in Christian nobleness the largest sphere of command is but a wider empire of obedience, calling them, not to escape from holy rule, but to its full impersonation.
    • James Martineau, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 456.
  • "Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less."
    "So power is a mummer's trick?"
    "A shadow on the wall," Varys murmured, "yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow."
  • Beware of the man who rises to power
    From one suspender.
    • Edgar Lee Masters, "John Hancock Otis", Spoon River Anthology (1915, reprinted 1916), p. 123. In this poem, the rich John Hancock Otis describes a man "born in a shanty and beginning life as a water carrier … then section hand … afterwards foreman … who rose to the superintendency of the railroad" as "a veritable slave driver, grinding the faces of labor, and a bitter enemy of democracy".
  • Superman: Batman won't quit so long as he can draw breath. None of my teammates will. Me? I've got a different problem. I feel like I live in a world made of cardboard. Always taking care not to break something, to break someone. Never allowing myself to lose control, even for a moment, or someone could die. But you can take it, can't you, big man? What we have here is a rare opportunity for me to cut loose, and show you just how powerful I really am.
  • If you want to discover just what there is in a man — give him power.
    • Francis Trevelyan Miller (1910), Portrait Life of Lincoln: Life of Abraham Lincoln, the Greatest American.
    • v. Ingersoll
  • Freedom, particularly social freedom, is indeed utterly antithetical to a state, even a representative one. At the most basic level, representation "asks" that we give our freedom away to another; it assumes, in essence, that some should have power and many others shouldn't. Without power, equally distributed to all, we renounce our very capacity to join with everyone else in meaningfully shaping our society. We renounce our ability to self-determine, and thus our liberty. And so, no matter how enlightened leaders may be, they are governing as tyrants nonetheless, since we—"the people"—are servile to their decisions. This is not to say that representative government is comparable with more authoritarian forms of rule. A representative system that fails in its promise of, say, universal human rights is clearly preferable to a government that makes no such pretensions at all. Yet even the kindest of representative systems necessarily entails a loss of liberty. Like capitalism, a grow-or-die imperative is built into the state's very structure. [...] Whatever a state does, then, has to be in its own interests. Sometimes, of course, the state's interests coincide with those of various groups or people; they may even overlap with concepts such as justice or compassion. But these convergences are in no way central or even essential to its smooth functioning. They are merely instrumental stepping-stones as the state continually moves to maintain, solidify, and consolidate its power. Because, like it or not, all states are forced to strive for a monopoly on power. [...] In this quest to monopolize power, there will always have to be dominated subjects. As institutionalized systems of domination, then, neither state nor capital are controllable. Nor can they be mended or made benign.
  • If freedom is the social aim, power must be held horizontally. We must all be both rulers and ruled simultaneously, or a system of rulers and subjects is the only alternative. We must all hold power equally in our hands if freedom is to coexist with power. Freedom, in other words, can only be maintained through a sharing of political power, and this sharing happens through political institutions. Rather than being made a monopoly, power should be distributed to us all, thereby allowing all our varied "powers" (of reason, persuasion, decision making, and so on) to blossom. This is the power to create rather than dominate.
  • Without his rod revers'd,
    And backward mutters of dissevering power.

N

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O

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  • Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

P

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  • When citizens are relatively equal, politics has tended to be fairly democratic. When a few individuals hold enormous amounts of wealth, democracy suffers. The reason for this pattern is simple. Through campaign contributions, lobbying, influence over public discourse, and other means, wealth can be translated into political power. When wealth is highly concentrated—that is, when a few individuals have enormous amounts of money—political power tends to be highly concentrated, too. The wealthy few tend to rule. Average citizens lose political power. Democracy declines.
  • Average Americans have little or no influence over the making of U.S. government policy. ... Wealthy Americans wield a lot of influence. By investing money in politics, they can turn economic power into political power.
  • All who are at all familiar with history know that men will abuse power when they possess it.
  • Authority is not mere power, and it is extremely unhelpful, even dangerous, to confuse the two. When people exert power over others, they compel them, forcefully. They apply the threat of privation or punishment so their subordinates have little choice but to act in a manner contrary to their personal needs, desires, and values. When people wield authority, by contrast, they do so because of their competence—a competence that is spontaneously recognized and appreciated by others, and generally followed willingly, with a certain relief, and with the sense that justice is being served. […]
Now, power may accompany authority, and perhaps it must. However, and more important, genuine authority constrains the arbitrary exercise of power. This constraint manifests itself when the authoritative agent cares, and takes responsibility, for those over whom the exertion of power is possible. The oldest child can take accountability for his younger siblings, instead of domineering over and teasing and torturing them, and can learn in that manner how to exercise authority and limit the misuse of power. Even the youngest can exercise appropriate authority over the family dog.

R

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  • “It is not so much the girls’ sexuality per se…but the fact that they have sex with other boys”. Sex is considered to be a masculine trait because it is a form of power over someone, and if a woman tries to take control of this power she will instantly be punished for trying. Her sexual freedom is not within gender-norms and the patriarchal society does not accept it. Only “male domination is natural and follows inevitable from evolutionary…or social pressures”.
  • Klaus Reiser [Kimmel, Michael S., Amy Aronson. 2008. The Gendered Society Reader, 3rd Ed. New York: Oxford University Press.] [McIntosh Peggy. 1988. “White Privilege and Male Privilege.” Pp. 76-87 in Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, edited by Margaret Anderson and Patricia Hill Collins. San Francisco: Wadsworth Publishing Co.]
  • Power is the ultimate determinant in human society, being basic to the relations within any group and between groups. It implies the ability to defend one’s interests and if necessary to impose one’s will by any means available. In relations between peoples, the question of power determines maneuverability in bargaining, the extent to which one people respect the interests of another, and eventually the extent to which a people survive as a physical and cultural entity. When one society finds itself forced to relinquish power entirely to another society, that in itself is a form of underdevelopment.
  • To the essence of power as a specifically human phenomenon belongs its ability to give purpose to things. Power awaits direction. Unlike the forces of nature, it becomes part of a cause_and-effect relationship, not through necessity, but only through the intervention of an agent. Power receives its character only when someone becomes aware of it, determines its use, and puts it to work. This means that someone must answer for it.
    • Romano Guardini, Power And Responsibility A Course Of Action For The New Age (1961), pp. 3-4
  • Modern cities everywhere are alike, whether in Western Europe, China, North or South America, or Russia. A type of man is evolving who lives only in the present, who is "replaceable" to a terrifying degree, and who all too easily falls victim to power. The modern state shares the characteristics just described. It too is losing its organic structure, becoming more and more a complex of all-controlling functions. In it the human being steps back, the apparatus forward.
    • Romano Guardini, Power And Responsibility A Course Of Action For The New Age (1961), p. 45
  • In proportion to power is responsibility.
  • Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
  • The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique.
  • The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.

S

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The political organization of Rome might dazzle the world with its power, but it was oppressive; hence there was nothing sacred or divine about it. ... In Jesus' eyes God's ultimate historical word is love, whereas the ultimate historical word of power in the human world is oppression. Jesus' journey to the cross is a trial dealing with the authentic nature of power. ~ Jon Sobrino
  • Over mortals all desire to reign,
    Not understanding that God himself hates
    The lust of rule, and most of all things hates
    Insatiate kings fearful in wickedness,
    And over them he stirs up what is dark
  • Power, like a desolating pestilence,
    Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
    Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
    Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
    A mechanized automaton.
  • . . . How stern
    And desolate a tract is this wide world!
    How withered all the buds of natural good!
    No shade, no shelter from the sweeping storms
    Of pitiless power!
  • it’s mysterious how these power structures unfold, isn’t it, and how we’re willing to accept them and allow them to prevail without questioning them.
  • Perhaps it was as Ed said, that arbitrary power corrupts arbitrarily.
    • John Sladek, Masterson and the Clerks (originally published in New Worlds Science Fiction #177, September 1967; reprinted in Michael Moorcock (ed.) Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4, p. 143); alluding to Lord Acton's quote above.
  • God is not simply power, as most people were inclined to think. God is love, and he manifests himself in the dialectics of an impotent love. ... The emperor is not God. Jesus desacralizes that kind of power and its claim to be the absolute mediation of God. The pax romana is not the kingdom of God. The political organization of Rome might dazzle the world with its power, but it was oppressive; hence there was nothing sacred or divine about it. ... In Jesus' eyes God's ultimate historical word is love, whereas the ultimate historical word of power in the human world is oppression. Jesus' journey to the cross is a trial dealing with the authentic nature of power.
    • Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads (1978), p. 369
  • The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.
    • Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time (1995), Ch. 6: The New King: Tyranny of the Corporate Core, p. 90.
 
Socialism means power, power, and more power. Thoughts and schemes are nothing without power. ~ Oswald Spengler
  • Socialism means power, power, and more power. Thoughts and schemes are nothing without power. The path to power has already been mapped: the valuable elements of German labor in union with the best representatives of the Old Prussian state idea, both groups determined to build a strictly socialist state to democratize our nation in the Prussian manner; both forged into a unit by the same sense of duty, by the awareness of a great obligation, by the will to obey in order to rule, to die in order to win, by the strength to make immense sacrifices in order to accomplish what we were born for, what we are, what could not be without us. We are socialists. Let us hope that it will not have been in vain.
  • Nonviolent action involves opposing the opponent's power, including his police & military capacity, not with the weapons chosen by him but by quite different means. ... Repression by the opponent is used against his own power position in a kind of political "ju-jitsu" and the very sources of his power thus reduced or removed, with the result that his political and military position is seriously weakened or destroyed.
  • If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.

T

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Lust of power is the most flagrant of all the passions. ~ Tacitus
 
The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence. In the United States the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. Everybody there adopts great numbers of theories, on philosophy, morals, and politics, without inquiry, upon public trust; and if we examine it very closely, it will be perceived that religion itself holds sway there much less as a doctrine of revelation than as a commonly received opinion. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
  • Suspectum semper invisumque dominantibus qui proximus destinaretur.
    • Rulers always hate and suspect the next in succession.
    • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), I. 21.
  • Imperium flagitio acquisitum nemo unquam bonis artibus exercuit.
    • Power acquired by guilt was never used for a good purpose.
    • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), I. 30.
  • Imperium cupientibus nihil medium inter summa et præcipitia.
    • In the struggle between those seeking power there is no middle course.
    • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), II. 74.
  • Potentiam cautis quam acribus consiliis tutius haberi.
    • Power is more safely retained by cautious than by severe councils.
    • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), XI. 29.
  • Cupido dominandi cunctis affectibus flagrantior est.
    • Lust of power is the most flagrant of all the passions.
    • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), XV. 53.
  • “You think staying in power is why they do it?”
    “That’s usually the reason for arbitrary cruelty.”
  • To create and to annihilate material substance, cause it to aggregate in forms according to his desire, would be the supreme manifestation of the power of Man's mind, his most complete triumph over the physical world, his crowning achievement, which would place him beside his Creator, make him fulfill his Ultimate Destiny.
  • The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence. In the United States the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. Everybody there adopts great numbers of theories, on philosophy, morals, and politics, without inquiry, upon public trust; and if we examine it very closely, it will be perceived that religion itself holds sway there much less as a doctrine of revelation than as a commonly received opinion.
  • All power corrupts, absolute power is even more fun.
  • My story Lord of the Rings is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for Domination). Nuclear physics can be used for that purpose. But they need not be. They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false.
    • J. R. R. Tolkien; in letter draft to Joanna de Bortadano (Apr 1956); in Humphrey Carpenter (ed.) assisted by Christopher Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1995, 2014), 246, Letter No. 186.
  • Real power is--I don't even want to use the word--fear.
  • Though he hadn't wanted to attend NYMA, certain things made sense for Donald there, just as ROTC had for Freddy. There was structure, and there were consequences to his actions. There was a logical system of punishment and reward. At the same time, though, life at NYMA reinforced one of Fred's lessons: the person with the power (no matter how arbitrarily that power was conferred or attained) got to decide what was right and wrong. Anything that helped you maintain power was by definition right, even if it wasn't always fair. NYMA also reinforced Donald's aversion to vulnerability, which is essential for tapping into love and creativity because it can also expose us to shame, something he could not tolerate. By necessity he had to improve his impulse control, not only to avoid punishment but to help him get away with transgressions that required a little more finesse.
    • Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (2020), p. 53

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  • Remember, I have not appointed you as commanders and tyrants over the people. I have sent you as leaders instead, so that the people may follow your example. Give the Muslims their rights and do not beat them lest they become abused. Do not praise them unduly, lest they fall into the error of conceit. Do not keep your doors shut in their faces, lest the more powerful of them eat up the weaker ones. And do not behave as if you were superior to them, for that is tyranny over them.
    • Umar as quoted in Omar the Great: The Second Caliph Of Islam (1962) by Muhammad Shibli Numani, Vol. 2, p. 33.

V

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  • Power consists in making oneself the goal of another person's social instincts, without seeking to satisfy one's own social instincts through him. The other then does everything one asks. Powerlessness consists in wanting or having to satisfy one's social instincts through another person whose social instincts one has not succeeded in concentrating on oneself — one then does everything the other asks.
  • Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.
    • If I can not influence the gods, I shall move all hell.
    • Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), VII. 312.
  • That, decided Elric, was the root of decadence—when power is enjoyed solely for its own sake.

W

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  • All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation.
  • Every institution which grapples with the problem of molding recalcitrant material into a fairer shape—and nothing is more recalcitrant than the passions and interests of men—runs the risk of being defeated by its material. And since the institution which proposes the ideal is itself served by fallible human beings, the danger is not only that the experiment may fail but that the artists themselves, wrestling with such insidious substances as power, responsibility, and material goods, may themselves be caught by these powerful instincts, may appropriate to themselves the power they sought to tame or the riches they had hoped to divert to a nobler cause.
  • Man is constantly being assured that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness. … If he is with a business organization, the odds are great that he has sacrificed every other kind of independence in return for that dubious one known as financial.
  • An untoward event. (Threatening to disturb the balance of power.)
    • Duke of Wellington, on the destruction of the Turkish Navy at the battle of Navarino (Oct. 20, 1827).
  • My cool judgement is, that if all the other doctrines of devils which have been committed to writing since letters were in the world were collected together in one volume, it would fall short of this; and that, should a Prince form himself by this book, so calmly recommending hypocrisy, treachery, lying, robbery, oppression, adultery, whoredom, and murder of all kinds, Domitian or Nero would be an angel of light compared to that man.
    • John Wesley, comment after reading The Works of Nicholas Machiavel, journal entry (January 26, 1737); in Nehemiah Curnock, ed., The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M. (1909), vol. 1, p. 313.
  • Power is habit-forming. We grew addicted to it. Few things survive the centuries’ slow decay: senses grow dull; passions grow weak; and ideals die. Only the taste for power lives on as an excuse for survival.
  • Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.
  • Better were the prospects of a people under the influence of the worst government who should hold the power of changing it, than those of a people under the best who should hold no such power.
    • Frances Wright, Independence Day speech at New Harmony (4 July 1828), sometimes noted as the first major public address by a woman to occur in the United States, as published in Course of Popular Lectures as Delivered by Frances Wright (1829) Address I, p. 171 - 182

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  • Power never takes a back step — only in the face of more power.

Z

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  • Every Communist must grasp the truth: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

Dialogue

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My father's no different than any other powerful man – any man who's responsible for other people, like a senator or a president.
Kay Adams: [laughs] You know how naïve you sound?
Michael: Why?
Kay: Senators and presidents don't have men killed.
Michael: Oh. Who's being naïve, Kay?

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 622-24.
  • Give me a lever long enough
    And a prop strong enough,
    I can single handed move the world.
  • Odin, thou whirlwind, what a threat is this
    Thou threatenest what transcends thy might, even thine,
    For of all powers the mightiest far art thou,
    Lord over men on earth, and Gods in Heaven;
    Yet even from thee thyself hath been withheld
    One thing — to undo what thou thyself hast ruled.
  • Iron hand in a velvet glove.
    • Attributed to Charles V. Used also by Napoleon. See Carlyle, Latter Day Pamphlets, No, II.
  • To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it: the pains of power are real, its pleasures imaginary.
  • Qui peut ce qui lui plaît, commande alors qu'il prie.
    • Whoever can do as he pleases, commands when he entreats.
    • Pierre Corneille, Sertorius, IV. 2.
  • So mightiest powers by deepest calms are fed,
    And sleep, how oft, in things that gentlest be!
  • For what can power give more than food and drink,
    To live at ease, and not be bound to think?
  • Du bist noch nicht der Mann den Teufel festzuhalten.
  • O what is it proud slime will not believe
    Of his own worth, to hear it equal praised
    Thus with the gods?
  • Nihil est quod credere de se
    Non possit, quum laudatur dis æqua potestas.
    • There is nothing which power cannot believe of itself, when it is praised as equal to the gods.
    • Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), IV. 70.
  • Et qui nolunt occidere quemquam
    Posse volunt.
    • Those who do not wish to kill any one, wish they had the power.
    • Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), X. 96.
  • Ut desint vires tamen est laudanda voluntas.
    • Though the power be wanting, yet the wish is praiseworthy.
    • Ovid, Epistolæ Ex Ponto, III. 4. 79.
  • A cane non magno sæpe tenetur aper.
    • The wild boar is often held by a small dog.
    • Ovid, Remedia Amoris, 422.
  • Nunquam est fidelis cum potente societas.
    • A partnership with men in power is never safe.
    • Phaedrus, Fables, I. 5. 1.
  • Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.
  • And deal damnation round the land.
  • The powers that be are ordained of God.
  • Kann ich Armeen aus der Erde stampfen?
    Wächst mir ein Kornfeld in der flachen Hand?
    • Can I summon armies from the earth?
      Or grow a cornfield on my open palm?
    • Friedrich Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, I. 3.
  • Ich fühle eine Armee in meiner Faust.
  • Quod non potest vult posse, qui nimium potest.
    • He who is too powerful, is still aiming at that degree of power which is unattainable.
    • Seneca the Younger, Hippolytus, 215.
  • Minimum decet libere cui multum licet.
  • No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
    But the whole boundless continent is yours.
    • Jonathan Sewall, Epilogue to Addison's Cato. Written for the performance at the Bow Street Theatre, Portsmouth, N.H.
  • The awful shadow of some unseen Power
    Floats, tho' unseen, amongst us.
  • Male imperando summum imperium amittitur.
    • The highest power may be lost by misrule.
    • Syrus, Maxims.
  • I thought that my invincible power would hold the world captive, leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.
  • Et errat longe, mea quidem sententia,
    Qui imperium credat esse gravius, aut stabilius,
    Vi quod fit, quam illud quod amicitia adjungitur.
    • And he makes a great mistake, in my opinion at least, who supposes that authority is firmer or better established when it is founded by force than that which is welded by affection.
    • Terence, Adelph, Act I. 1, line 40.
  • A power is passing from the earth.

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)

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  • Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
  • There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
  • In the main it will be found that a power over a man's support [salary] is a power over his will.
  • From this we learn that a wise prince sees to it that never, in order to attack someone, does he become the ally of a prince more powerful than himself, except when necessity forces him, as I said above. If you win, you are the powerful king's prisoner, and wise princes avoid as much as they can being in other men's power.
    • Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 21, in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert, vol. 1, p. 83–84 (1965).
  • The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
    • James Madison, speech in the Virginia constitutional convention, Richmond, Virginia (December 2, 1829), in Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison vol. 9 (1910), p. 361. These words are inscribed in the Madison Memorial Hall, Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building.
  • The power of Kings and Magistrates is nothing else, but what is only derivative, transferr'd and committed to them in trust from the People, to the Common good of them all, in whom the power yet remaines fundamentally, and cannot be tak'n from them, without a violation of thir natural birthright.
    • John Milton, "The Tenure of Kings", The Works of John Milton, vol. 5, p. 10 (1932).
  • For we put the power in the people.
    • William Penn. Robert Proud, The History of Pennsylvania in North America, vol. 1, p. 139 (1797).
  • They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people's Government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.
    • Franklin D. Roosevelt, annual message to the Congress, January 3, 1936. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936, p. 16 (1938).
  • When I resist, therefore, when I as a Democrat resist the concentration of power, I am resisting the processes of death, because the concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human initiative, and, therefore of human energy.
    • Woodrow Wilson, governor of New Jersey, speech, New York City, September 4, 1912. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, vol. 25, p. 100 (1978). This speech was delivered to the Woodrow Wilson Workingmen's League "dollar dinner", at the Yorkville Casino.

See also

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Wikipedia
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Wiktionary
Look up power in Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Social and political philosophy
Ideologies Anarchism ⦿ Aristocratic Radicalism (Nietzsche • Brandes...) ⦿ Autarchism ⦿ Ba'athism (• Aflaq • al-Assad • Hussein) ⦿ Communism ⦿ (Neo-)Confucianism ⦿ Conservatism ⦿ Constitutionalism ⦿ Dark Enlightenment ⦿ Environmentalism ⦿ Fascism (• Islamo- • Eco- • Francoism...) vs. Nazism ⦿ Feminism (• Anarcha- • Radical • Gender-critical • Second-wave...) ⦿ Formalism/(Neo-)cameralism ⦿ Freudo-Marxism ⦿ Gaddafism/Third International Theory ⦿ Legalism ⦿ Leninism/Vanguardism ⦿ Juche (• Kim Il-sung • Kim Jong Il • Kim Jong Un...) ⦿ Liberalism ⦿ Libertarianism/Laissez-faire Capitalism ⦿ Maoism ⦿ Marxism ⦿ Mohism ⦿ Republicanism ⦿ Social democracy ⦿ Socialism ⦿ Stalinism ⦿ Straussianism ⦿ Syndicalism ⦿ Xi Jinping thought ⦿ New Monasticism (• MacIntyre • Dreher...)
Modalities Absolutism vs. Social constructionism/Relativism ⦿ Autarky/Autonomy vs. Heteronomy ⦿ Authoritarianism/Totalitarianism ⦿ Colonialism vs. Imperialism ⦿ Communitarianism vs. Liberalism ⦿ Elitism vs. Populism/Majoritarianism/Egalitarianism ⦿ Individualism vs. Collectivism ⦿ Nationalism vs. Cosmopolitanism ⦿ Particularism vs. Universalism ⦿ Modernism/Progressivism vs. Postmodernism ⦿ Reactionism/Traditionalism vs. Futurism/Transhumanism
Concepts Alienation ⦿ Anarcho-tyranny ⦿ Anomie ⦿ Authority ⦿ Conquest's Laws of Politics ⦿ Duty ⦿ Eugenics ⦿ Elite ⦿ Elite theory ⦿ Emancipation ⦿ Equality ⦿ Freedom ⦿ Government ⦿ Hegemony ⦿ Hierarchy ⦿ Iron law of oligarchy ⦿ Justice ⦿ Law ⦿ Monopoly ⦿ Natural law ⦿ Noblesse oblige ⦿ Norms ⦿ Obedience ⦿ Peace ⦿ Pluralism ⦿ Polyarchy ⦿ Power ⦿ Propaganda ⦿ Property ⦿ Revolt ⦿ Rebellion ⦿ Revolution ⦿ Rights ⦿ Ruling class ⦿ Social contract ⦿ Social inequality ⦿ Society ⦿ State ⦿ Tocqueville effect ⦿ Totalitarian democracy ⦿ War ⦿ Utopia
Government Aristocracy ⦿ Autocracy ⦿ Bureaucracy ⦿ Dictatorship ⦿ Democracy ⦿ Meritocracy ⦿ Monarchy ⦿ Ochlocracy ⦿ Oligarchy ⦿ Plutocracy ⦿ Technocracy ⦿ Theocracy ⦿ Tyranny
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