Edmund Burke Quotes

What is 'power' anyway? Power is an ego trip. Power is a way to rise yourself up by lowering others, and I want nothing of it.

Power is what men seek, and any group that gets it will abuse it. It is the same story.

No one man should have all that power.

One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.

The less the power, the greater the desire to exercise it.

Power, carried to extremes, is always liable to reaction.

The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessary than liberty but more dangerous.

Those that have so much power over others as to be able to oppress them have seldom so much over themselves as not to oppress.

The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.

But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.

He was always testing you. He was always testing his power.

Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it.

When you meet powerful men or just read about them in the newspapers, you see that they don't have a sense of boundaries.

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.

Power says if you are a committee chairman, your idea is good only because you have got power.

There are two things that interest me - and they're both power, ultimately. One is not having it and one is abusing it.

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.

Power protects power.

Oppression is the essence of power.

More power than any good man should have, and more power than any other kind of man ought to have.

Power is a very peculiar thing. It's like the ego. The ego's only there to keep you above water. Once we realize something good about ourselves, we have a tendency to abuse the gift.

Power is, in its nature, encroaching; and such is the human make that men who are vested with a share of it are generally inclined to take more than it was intended they should have.

I think it's a dangerous thing for anyone to have power over other people.

Power never takes two weeks off. Power takes long weekends.

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.