Power Exercise Quotes

As to mere power I have been for years in the daily exercise of more personal authority than any President habitually enjoys.

Great powers are granted the legitimacy to exercise power on the global stage, but the price is a willingness to act—at least at the margins and consistent with their self-interest—for the common good.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

We should not be content to say that power has a need for such-and-such a discovery, such-and-such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. ... The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power. ... It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power.

The king, in possession of the throne, was the sole representative of sovereignty, the sole representative of power. Not so in a Republic … Here we have no sole representative of power. The ballot box is the instrumentality through which the sovereign power is exercised.

Elections determine who is in power, but they do not determine how power is used.

A superpower, however, is only as good as the forces through which it exercises that power.

Is there a Legislative power in fact, not expressly prohibited by the Constitution, which might not, according to the doctrine of the Court, be exercised as a means of carrying into effect some specified Power?

You have no power at all if you do not exercise constant power.

Every politician should go and spend time and visit prisons and jails. Because if you are choosing to exercise this kind of power over another person's life, there's a role for that, but you have to know the kind of power you are exercising.

Relations of power "are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power."

We must take, and continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized.

Clear limits should be set on how power is exercised in cyberspace by companies as well as governments through the democratic political process and enforced through law.

Any power, of course, depends upon the values of the person exercising the power.

Content is an obstacle to the exercise of power.

I have several times suggested that what I call the “Establishment” in this country is today more powerful than ever before. By “Establishment” I do not mean only the centers of official power – though they are certainly part of it – but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised ... the “Establishment” can be seen at work in the activities of, not only the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Earl Marshal, but of such lesser mortals as the Chairman of the Arts Council, the Director-General of the BBC, and even the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, not to mention dignitaries like Lady Violet Bonham Carter.

If the exercise of power of internal taxation by the Union should be discovered on experiment to be really inconvenient, the federal government may then forbear the use of it . . .

All forms of power - even based on the consensus of the democratic system - react when they are being attacked, or when those who exercise power become a target.

...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.

Men are never very wise in the exercise of a new power.

Probably it's insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the State, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible; the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other.

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused.

Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or 'anatomy' of power, a technology.

To enable men to exercise that power is the object of protection.