These political power quotes will inspire you. Political power is the ability to control the behavior of people and/or influence the outcome of events.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging political power quotes, political power sayings, and political power proverbs.
Best Political Power Quotes
- “Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.” ~ Henry A. Wallace
- “Political power intoxicates the best hearts. No man is wise enough, nor good enough, to be trusted with much political power.” ~ Hans F. Sennholz
- “Mankind will never see an end of trouble until lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power become lovers of wisdom” ~ Plato
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“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” ~ Mao Zedong
- “Political power does not rest with those who cast votes; political power rests with those who count votes.” ~ Joseph Stalin
- “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” ~ John Adams
- “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.” ~ Joseph Stalin
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“Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.” ~ Rudolph Rummel
- “Catholicism is more than a religion, it is a political power. Therefore I’m led to believe there will be no peace in Ireland until the Catholic Church is crushed” ~ Oliver Cromwell
- “So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power.” ~ Frederick Jackson Turner
- “It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.” ~ Rebecca Goldstein
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“A cult is a religion with no political power.” ~ Tom Wolfe
- “When economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny.” ~ John Adams
- “Our society will always remain an unstable and explosive compound as long as political power is vested in the masses and economic power in the classes. In the end one of these powers will rule. Either the plutocracy will buy up the democracy, or the democracy will vote away the plutocracy.” ~ Irving Fisher
- “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power…. a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“Political power without economic power is sterile.” ~ Louis O. Kelso
- “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” ~ Thomas Paine
- “Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophise, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils,… nor, I think, will the human race.” ~ Plato
- “It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein
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“The greatest power is not money power, but political power.” ~ Walter Annenberg
- “I grow more and more suspicious of the political powers that take men away from their work and set them shooting one another.” ~ Helen Keller
- “Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of liberty and the rights of man. They knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise and republican self-government could succeed only if power were widely distributed. And since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people of the country. The truth of this insight is immediately apparent.” ~ Ronald Reagan
- “All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.” ~ Frank Chodorov
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“The people of this country, not special interest big money, should be the source of all political power.” ~ Paul Wellstone
- “From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.” ~ Terry Eagleton
- “It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.” ~ Jose Saramago
- “When we speak of power, we mean man’s control over the minds and actions of other men. By political power we refer to the mutual relations of control among the holders of public authority and between the latter and the people at large.” ~ Hans Morgenthau
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“To limit money is to limit political power.” ~ Stefan Molyneux
- “A world where Congressmen spend 30 to 70 percent of their time raising money from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1% is a world where that tiny, tiny fraction has enormous power. And it’s that inequality in political power that enables this corrupted system to happen.” ~ Lawrence Lessig
- “People who seek political power are, with exceptions too rare to matter, never to be trusted; at best, such people are vain and officious busybodies. People who actually achieve political power are to be trusted even less than those who seek it without success; winning elections requires a measure of deceitfulness and Machiavellian immorality that no decent person comes close to possessing.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
- “It is sad to witness the persistence in our society of the racism and xenophobia that seems to be a permanent part of our political culture. It is shameful to see politicians exploiting these human weaknesses in order to gain political power. It is most depressing of all to contemplate a future in which politicians who do this will continue to have influence over people’s lives.” ~ Allen W. Wood
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“Money, media, and political power are very closely connected.” ~ Alexander Stille
- “There must be an end to white monopoly on political power, and a fundamental restructuring of our political and economic systems to ensure that the inequalities of apartheid are addressed and our society thoroughly democratized.” ~ Nelson Mandela
- “Separation of church and state cannot mean an absolute separation between moral principles and political power.” ~ Edward Kennedy
- “Communism is an aspiration, an aspiration is an ideal, a dream, a longing of something that would be perfect, but hard to build because it has to clash with human nature and against the egotism of humans and the egotism of the elites which usually try to guarantee their own interests above those of their nations and of their own people. But they are the ones that prevail because they have the economic power, the political power and the military power.” ~ Alejandro Castro Espin
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“All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.” ~ Hunter S. Thompson
- “Chairman Mao once said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. He was only partly right: power that comes from the barrel of a gun can be effective only for a short time. In the end, peoples love for truth, justice, freedom, and democracy will triumph. No matter what governments do, the human spirit will always prevail.” ~ Dalai Lama
- “There will be no end to the troubles of states,Or of humanity itself,Till philosophers become kings in this world,Or till those we now call kings and rulers really And truly become philosophers” ~ Plato
- “It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creeds into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein
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“Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it.” ~ Daniel Suarez
- “You must make women count as much as men; you must have an equal standard of morals; and the only way to enforce that is through giving women political power so that you can get that equal moral standard registered in the laws of the country. It is the only way.” ~ Emmeline Pankhurst
- “Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?” ~ Khalil Gibran
- “Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.” ~ Jose Saramago
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“When governments become large, voters cannot exercise close oversight, otherwise known as political power.” ~ Maggie Gallagher
- “All political power is primarily an illusion. Illusion. Mirrors and blue smoke, beautiful blue smoke rolling over the surface of highly polished mirrors, first a thin veil of blue smoke, then a thick cloud that suddenly dissolves into wisps of blue smoke, the mirrors catching it all, bouncing it back and forth.” ~ Jimmy Breslin
- “Money is power, and in that government which pays all the public officers of the states will all political power be substantially concentrated.” ~ Andrew Jackson
- “Though, with the ascendancy of Louis, the political power of the nobles finally came to an end, France remained, in the whole complexion of her social life, completely aristocratic.” ~ Lytton Strachey
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“It is not the qualified voters, but the qualified voters who choose to vote, that constitute political power.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.” ~ Andrea Mitchell
- “Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d’état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes…. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.” ~ Umberto Eco
- “The challenge remains. On the other side are formidable forces: money, political power, the major media. On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth.” ~ Howard Zinn
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“The Church is not a political power, nor a political party, but rather a moral reality, a moral force.” ~ Pope Benedict XVI
- “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders…tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” ~ Hermann Goring
- “We have but to remember man’s natural tendency to satisfy his desires with the minimum of effort to realize how political power will be utilized.” ~ Frank Chodorov
- “Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.” ~ Alan Greenspan
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“You can’t keep changing the rules based upon who holds political power.” ~ Matthew Dowd
- “One way we exercise political freedom is to vote for the candidate of our choice. Another way is to use our money to try to persuade other voters to make a similar choice – that is, to contribute to our candidate’s campaign. If either of these freedoms is violated, the consequences are very grave not only for the individual voter and contributor, but for the society whose free political processes depend on a wide distribution of political power.” ~ Barry Goldwater
- “By the very nature of government schooling, the matter of what goes into school textbooks must necessarily be a political matter, to be decided by those I political power.” ~ Jacob G. Hornberger
- “The abuse of political power is not as important as the loss of lives. Plus there is a process for curing the abuse of institutions.” ~ Babatunde Fashola
- “Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will. It allows other forces to arise side by side with and in opposition to political power. It thus becomes the basis of all those activities that are free from violent interference on the part of the state. It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in which the autonomy of the individual and ultimately all intellectual and material progress are rooted.” ~ Ludwig von Mises
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“The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.” ~ Milton Friedman
- “Our inspired Constitution is wisely designed to protect from excesses of political power, but it can do little to protect us from the excesses of appetite or from individual indifference to great principles or institutions. Any significant unraveling of the moral fiber of the American people, therefore, finally imperils the Constitution.” ~ Neal A. Maxwell
- “I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives” ~ Robert Caro
- “Naturally, the common people don’t want war … but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.” ~ Hermann Goring
- “Are we prepared to take on the enormous political power of the billionaire class or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy?” ~ Bernie Sanders
