Alfred Thayer Mahan Quotes

Force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished.

The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.

If you were to come to Minnesota, I could have you locked up like that. That's power.

I have with me two gods, Persuasion and Compulsion.

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.

Power is a tool, influence is a skill; one is a fist, the other a fingertip.

He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing.

Power is the most persuasive rhetoric.

Power tends to get confused with repression.

You use whatever lever you have.

It's your constitutional right, but if I were you, I wouldn't do it. I can do better for you.

There is power in controlling something that can do so much damage - in controlling something, period.

You can make people do anything if they're afraid.

If you can't force or are unwilling to force your people to follow you, with or without threats, you are not a leader.

I don't believe in strong-arming people.

Influence is like a savings account. The less you use it, the more you've got.

Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

I think the power of persuasion would be the greatest superpower of all time.

Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve.

Power is an instrument of fatal consequence. It is confined no more readily than quicksilver, and escapes good intentions as easily as air flows through mesh.

When you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat.

Power intoxicates men. It is never voluntarily surrendered. It must be taken from them.

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.

Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.