Seizing Power Quotes & Sayings

Parisians had no doubt that, should the Huguenots succeed in seizing power in France, as it was obvious they were trying to do, the Catholic population would be either forced to convert or suffer annihilation. But — Nancy Goldstone

The difference between men who succeed or fail is their ability to handle pressure. — Edwin Louis Cole

More women speaking up and seizing the helm of power can create its own momentum. It can change the culture that helps perpetuate those external forces. — Nancy Birdsall

Everyday create your history, every path you take you're leaving your legacy. — Michael Jackson

Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted. — George Orwell

Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new forces that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power. Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules. — Michel Foucault

After seizing state power, the victors have a powerful interest in moving the revolution out of the streets and into the museums and schoolbooks as quick as possible, lest the people decide to repeat the experience. — James C. Scott

People think that the destructive theories that nowadays go by the name "socialism" are of recent origin. This is a mistake: these theories were contemporaneous with the first Economists. While they employed the all-powerful government of their dreams as an instrument to change the forms of society, socialists imagined seizing the same power to undermine its base. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Give me a good sharp knife and a good sharp cheese and I'm a happy man. — George R R Martin

We do well to ask about the catechetical value of our songs of worship. What vision of God do they convey? Do they serve well the proclamation of the biblical Gospel? Are the doctrines they exposit or imply sound doctrines that conform to the Gospel? Are our songs biblically based, and clearly so? Have we humbled ourselves to learn from the saints who have gone before us by singing the best of the songs from of old? Or do we limit ourselves to only the newest of the new songs? How can we do a better job of seizing upon the catechetical nature and formative power of our past and present hymnody? — J.I. Packer

It's the camel's nose in the tent. Look at Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin
every one of these monsters, on seizing power, their first act was to confiscate all firearms in private hands ... — Charlton Heston

The victory of the Church over the power which was embodied in the Roman imperial system was not won by seizing the levers of power: it was won when the victims knelt down in the Colosseum and prayed in the name of Jesus for the Emperor. — Lesslie Newbigin

It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini. — Aldous Huxley

You mean Ronald just stepped down after ten years?' he asked. She had to be putting him on.
'He just stepped down and George Bush became president.'
'And then George Bush shot Ronald Reagan to prevent him from seizing power?'
'No,' she said. 'I think they were friends.'
'Friends?' he asked. 'It makes me wonder how we lost the Cold War.'
'Good point. — Anthony Marra

Painting isn't a question of sensibility; it's a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice. — Pablo Picasso

If you like to be immortal, live for others and die for others. — Debasish Mridha

Your mind was seizing on something to try to make sense of the emotion. Can you see the power emotion has to distort our outlook? Makes u wonder, did you have a bad day, or did you make it a bad day? ... We can exert a lot of control over our emotions. But sometimes they run away with us. These bottled-up emotions hit you with a lot of force ... If you drink straight courage, you can beome reckless and foolhardy. For a good result, you have to temper the courage with a little fear, a little calm. Tanu, p109-110 — Brandon Mull

The Trilateralist Commission is international ... (and) ... is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateralist Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power - political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical. — Barry Goldwater

Some champions of ever-greater governmental power and spending invent the theory that the taxpayers, left to themselves, spend the money they have earned very foolishly, on all sorts of trivialities and rubbish, and that only the bureaucrats, by first seizing it from them, will know how to spend it wisely. — Henry Hazlitt

Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. — Donna J. Haraway

Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it, — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Is the result of cooperation the seizing of power? Not so: cooperation mysteriously creates more power than there was before, so that the more we work together the more power we discover is available to us. — Andy Crouch

To preserve what you have, to keep your relationships alive and glowing, give generously- give of your time, you assets, your attention, your help, and your love. Give of yourself. — Chris Prentiss

The genes supply the motivation for warfare, [E. O.] Wilson is saying, in humans as they do in chimps, but people, blessed with the power of language, look for some objective cause of war. A society psychs itself up to go to war by agreeing that their neighbors have wronged them, whether by seizing property or failing to deliver on some promise. Religious leaders confirm that the local deity favors their cause and off go the troops. — Nicholas Wade

If today you have nothing to be happy about, thank God for the potential of tomorrow. — Rickson Gracie

Government power is always abused by seizing and perverting the law. And with few exceptions, government always determines what is law. — John Galt

When a person can see into your soul, it's hard. It forces you to be open.
Vulnerable. It's much easier being with someone who's just more of a casual friend. - Dimitri — Richelle Mead

When they are in power, whether in statehouses, Congress, or the White House, Republicans are magnetically drawn to practice political overreach along with scorched-earth tactics, be it through vote suppression, the K Street Project to force lobbying firms to hire only Republicans, or outing a covert CIA agent in their own administration to settle political scores, as happened to Valerie Plame. When they are out of power they focus single-mindedly on seizing up the wheels of government to prove to the American people that government just doesn't work - at least, when the GOP is out of power. These take-no-prisoners tactics flow naturally from an embittered, Manichaean mind-set. This mentality has grave implications for the health of our constitutional system. — Anonymous

We can call this power intuition, but intuition is nothing more than a sudden and immediate seizing of what is real, without the need for words or formulas. — Anonymous

anarchism is to Marxism-Leninism what Anabaptism was to the magisterial Reformation: a revolutionary movement predicated upon negating, rather than seizing control of, state power. — Mark Van Steenwyk