Sovereign Power Quotes & Sayings

Sin is an exacting despot who can be vanquished by no created power, but by the sovereign power of Jesus Christ alone. — Martin Luther

God's Providence controls the universe. It is present everywhere. Providence is the sovereign Logos of God, imprinting form on the unformed materiality of the world, making and fashioning all things. Matter could not have acquired an articulated structure were it not for the directing power of the Logos Who is the Image, Intellect, Wisdom, and Providence of God. — Anthony The Great

You know, what makes the prison disappear is every deep, serious attachment. To be friends, to be brothers, to love; that opens the prison through sovereign power, through a most powerful spell. But he who doesn't have that remains in death. But where sympathy springs up again, life springs up again. — Vincent Van Gogh

Her visit had done Mary good in many ways. It had strengthened her patience and her hope; it had given her confidence in Margaret's sympathy; and last, and really least in comforting power (of so little value are silver and gold in comparison to love, that gift in every one's power to bestow), came the consciousness of the money-value of the sovereign she held in her hand. The many things it might purchase! First of all came the thought of the comfortable supper for her father that very night; and acting instantly upon the idea, she set off in hopes that all the provision shops might not yet be closed, although it was so late. That — Elizabeth Gaskell

It is manifest therefore that they who have sovereign power, are immediate rulers of the church under Christ, and all others but subordinate to them. If that were not, but kings should command one thing upon pain of death, and priests another upon pain of damnation, it would be impossible that peace and religion should stand together. — Thomas Hobbes

And so sovereign Providence has often produced a remarkable effect
evil men making other evil men good. For some, when they think they suffer injustice at the hands of the worst of men, burn with hatred for evil men, and being eager to be different from those they hate, have reformed and become virtuous. It is only the power of God to which evils may also be good, when by their proper use He elicits some good result. — Boethius

The slanders poured down like Niagara. If you take into consideration the setting - the war and the revolution - and the character of the accused - revolutionary leaders of millions who were conducting their party to the sovereign power - you can say without exaggeration that July 1917 was the month of the most gigantic slander in world history. — Leon Trotsky

Hobbes is not an absolutist precisely because he is an authoritarian. His scepticism about the power of reasoning, which applied no less to the 'artificial reason' of the Sovereign than to the reasoning of the natural man, together with the rest of his individualism, separate him from the rationalist dictators of his or any age. Indeed, Hobbes, without being himself a liberal, had in him more of the philosophy of liberalism than most of its professed defenders — Efraim Podoksik

Thus anxiety invited appeasement by magical sacrifice: human sacrifice led to man-hunting raids: one-sided raids turned into armed combat and mutual strife between rival powers. So ever larger numbers of people with more effective weapons were drawn into this dreadful ceremony, and what was at first an incidental prelude to a token sacrifice itself became the 'supreme sacrifice,' performed en masse. this ideological aberration was the final contribution to the perfection of the military megamachine, for the ability to wage war and to impose collective human sacrifice has remained the identifying mark of all sovereign power throughout history. — Lewis Mumford

Ought to have a universal compulsory force to move and arrange each part in the manner best suited to the whole. Just as nature gives each man an absolute power over all his members, the social compact gives the body politic an absolute power over all its members." "We grant that each person alienates, by the social compact, only that portion of his power, his goods, and liberty whose use is of consequence to the community; but we must also grant that only the sovereign is the judge of what is of consequence. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The God of metaphysics is but an idea. But the God of religion, the Maker of heaven and earth, the sovereign Judge of actions and thoughts, is a power. — Joseph Joubert

What we call "the laws of nature" merely reflect the normal way in which God sustains or governs the natural world. Perhaps the most wicked concept that has captured the minds of modern people is the belief that the universe operates by chance. That is the nadir of foolishness. Elsewhere, I have written more extensively on the scientific impossibility of assigning power to chance, because chance is simply a word that describes mathematical possibilities.* Chance is not a thing. It has no power. It cannot do anything, and therefore it cannot influence anything, yet some have taken the word chance, which has no power, and diabolically used it as a replacement for the concept of God. But the truth, as the Bible makes clear, is that nothing happens by chance and that all things are under the sovereign government of God, which is exceedingly comforting to the Christian who understands it. — R.C. Sproul

To the American people of 1789, their nation promised a new way of life: each individual a free man; each having the right to seek his own happiness; a republican form of government in which the people would be sovereign; and no arbitrary power over people's lives. Less than two hundred years later, almost every aspect of the dream has been lost. — Charles A. Reich

The people are the government, administering it by their agents; they are the government, the sovereign power. — Andrew Jackson

The whole basis of the Constitution was a restriction of power, and the whole basis of the federalist system was that there was not one sovereign centralized power from which all authority flows. — Roy Moore

Until we realize that our money power is our sovereign power we cannot act as sovereigns — E.C. Riegel

The second request of the very pure soul is to see the coming of the Father's kingdom (cf. Mt. 6:10). What this means first of all is that each day Christ should reign among holy men. And this happens when the devil's power has been driven out of our hearts through the expulsion of sinful foulness and when God has begun to reign within us amid the good odors of virtue. With fornication vanquished, chastity rules; with anger overcome, peace is king; with pride under foot, humility is sovereign. — John Cassian

In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel - and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride. — Vladimir Nabokov

Again, we are humble because we know we are not the power to change the heart. But we are obedient because we know we are the necessary means ordained by our sovereign God by which the light comes to those in darkness. — Mark Dever

Where the questions concern governmental power in a sovereign nation, it is not possible to select an umpire who is outside government. Every national government, so long as it is a government, must have the final say on its own power. — Murray N. Rothbard

There are no term limits on His reign. He has always been King and He always will be King. There is no death that threatens the perpetuity of His sovereign authority. There is no usurping of power by a lesser rival to His throne. There are no coups, no revolutions (at least, none that succeed). There is no threat of impeachment. He is a King who rules eternally. — Sam Storms

In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. Yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, such as the philosopher Herillus, who find in it the sovereign good and think it has the power to make us wise and happy. — Michel De Montaigne

From the origins of humanity, their biological privilege enabled men to affirm themselves alone as sovereign subjects; they never abdicated this privilege; they alienated part of their existence in Nature and in Woman; but they won it back afterward; condemned to play the role of the Other, woman was thus condemned to possess no more than precarious power: slave or idol, she was never the one who chose her lot. "Men make gods and women worship them," said Frazer; it is men who decide if their supreme divinities will be females or males; the place of woman in society is always the one they assign her; at no time has she imposed her own law. — Simone De Beauvoir

As your satsang deepens, the debris starts floating to the surface bringing much discomfort to the body-mind. Now is not the time for therapy or analysis. Simply leave it to the Sovereign Power whose benevolence washes away all delusion. Remember this! — Mooji

Under the Articles of Confederation, the national government had the power to issue commands to the several sovereign states, but it had no authority to govern individuals directly. — David Souter

We would have to say that hereditary succession is harmful. You may say the king, having sovereign power, will not in that case hand over to his children. But it is hard to believe that: it is a difficult achievement, which expects too much virtue of human nature. — Aristotle.

The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them. — Thomas Hobbes

A prince, the moment he is crown'd,
Inherits every virtue sound,
As emblems of the sovereign power,
Like other baubles in the Tower:
Is generous, valiant, just, and wise,
And so continues till he dies. — Jonathan Swift

The war we now face is a fundamental one. Democracy is a product of Western societal values that prize the individual and individual freedom. The very idea of a form of government in which power is vested in the people, who rule through their freely chosen representatives, is at odds with Middle Eastern and Islamic cultures in which the only sovereign is Allah. Because Allah alone is sovereign, man may not change Allah's rules. There can be no room left for religious liberty or pluralism. Contrary man-made laws have no place in such a society. Accordingly, only one ruler is needed to enforce divine law, law that may not be questioned. Democracy, on the other hand, by its very nature gives people the room to enact new laws to meet with the changing needs - whether real or merely perceived - of a given society. Thus from the Islamic perspective, a democratic system of government is a direct affront to Allah's supremacy. — Jay Sekulow

The necessity of creation is the sovereign power of choice — Sunday Adelaja

Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed-he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness? — Erich Fromm

They needed to be an independent state, sovereign perhaps, semiautonomous at least. Semiautonomy might be enough, given the realities of the two worlds; semiautonomy would justify calling it a free Mars. But in the current state of things they were no more than property, and had no real power over their own lives. Decisions were made for them a hundred million kilometers away. Their home was being chopped up into metal bits and shipped away. It was a waste, it benefited no one except a small metanational elite who were running the two worlds like feudal fiefdoms. No, they needed to be free - and not so that they could cast loose from Earth's terrible situation, not at all - rather, to be able to exert some real influence over what was happening down there. Otherwise they were only going to be helpless witnesses to catastrophe. And then sucked down into the maelstrom after the first sets of victims. That was intolerable. They had to act. — Kim Stanley Robinson

As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable. — Albert Einstein

The gift Anne brought me was the invitation to find my own sovereignty within myself, a center from which I was able not only to fully own my power, but also to give myself permission to create. To be an artist, you must first be sovereign unto yourself, because all art comes from a place of having owned your own shit. — Beth Wodandis

Law itself is either suspended, or regarded as an instrument that the state may use in the service of constraining and monitoring a given population; the state is not subject to the rule of law, but law can be suspended or deployed tactically and partially to suit the requirements of a state that seeks more and more to allocate sovereign power to its executive and administrative powers. The law is suspended in the name of "sovereignty" of the nation, where "sovereignty" denotes the task of any state to preserve and protect its own territoriality. — Judith Butler

Christians belive in a sovereign God who never says "Oops". We believe that all our days ... are divine strokes on the canvas of our lives by the Master Artist who certified his skill, his power, and his love in the Masterpiece of Calvary. If you doubt His skill in painting your life - look at the Calvary — John Piper

A religion that executes its obsolete sovereign must now establish the power of its new sovereign; it
closes the churches, and this leads to an endeavor to build a temple. The blood of the gods, which for a
second bespatters the confessor of Louis XVI, announces a new baptism. Joseph de Maistre qualified the
Revolution as satanic. We can see why and in what sense. Michelet, however, was closer to the truth
when he called it a purgatory. An era blindly embarks down this tunnel on an attempt to discover a new
illumination, a new happiness, and the face of the real God. But what will this new god be? — Albert Camus

You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps ... Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves. — Thomas Jefferson

I ask you neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my death, for your glory ... You alone know what is expedient for me; you are the sovereign master, do with me according to your will. Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apart from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets of your providence, which I adore, but do not seek to fathom. — Blaise Pascal

When states are democratically governed according to law, there are no demagogues, and the best citizens are securely in the saddle; but where the laws are not sovereign, there you find demagogues. The people become a monarch ... such people, in its role as a monarch, not being controlled by law, aims at sole power and becomes like a master. — Aristotle.

Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon. — Oriana Fallaci

On 18th September 2014, between the hours of 7am and 10pm, absolute sovereign power will lie in the hands of the Scottish people. They have to decide whether to keep it, or give it away to where their minority status makes them permanently powerless and vulnerable. — Jim Sillars

But ultimately, sovereign power really is, still, the right to brush such legalities aside, or to make them up as one goes along.164 The United States might call itself "a country of laws, not men," but as we have learned in recent years, American presidents can order torture, assassinations, domestic surveillance programs, even set up extra-legal zones like Guantanamo where they can treat prisoners pretty much any way they choose to. Even on the lowest levels, those who enforce the law are not really subject to it. It's extraordinary difficult, for instance, for a police officer to do anything to an American citizen that would lead to that officer being convicted of a crime.165 — David Graeber

The man who had asked my name in Obersalzberg in the summer of 1934 had been a dominant personality excluding a spellbinding charisma to which few were not prey. The embodied sovereign power, total power. The man whom I burnt and interred under a hail of Red Army shells near the Reich Chancellery was a trembling old man, a spent force, feeble, a failure. Like the Reich which he had aimed to bring into an era of unparalleled brilliance and opulence and had become a heap of rubble, he was the disfigured embodiment of his earlier self. — Heinz Linge

We [the Government] are here not as masters but as servants, we are not here to glory in power, but to attest our loyalty to the commands and restrictions laid down by our sovereign, the people of the United States, in whose name and by whose will we exercise our brief authority. — Charles Evans Hughes

The fortunes amassed through corporate organization are now so large, and vest such power in those that wield them, as to make it a matter of necessity to give to the sovereign - that is, to the Government, which represents the people as a whole - some effective power of supervision over their corporate use. In order to insure a healthy social and industrial life, every big corporation should be held responsible by, and be accountable to, some sovereign strong enough to control its conduct. — Theodore Roosevelt

Reverence the sovereign power over things in the Universe; this is what uses all and marshals all. In like manner, too, reverence the sovereign power in yourself; and this is of one kind with that. For in you also this is what uses the rest, and your manner of living is governed by this. — Marcus Aurelius

The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is written it is confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather. The Voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is free. 'The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.' The life is in the speaking words. God's word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God's Word in the universe. It is the present Voice which makes the written word powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

The members of a body-politic call it "the state" when it is passive, "the sovereign" when it is active, and a "power" when they compare it with others of its kind. Collectively they use the title "people," and they refer to one another individually as "citizens" when speaking of their participation in the authority of the sovereign, and as "subjects" when speaking of their subordination to the laws of the state. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Once again we may ask - how is it that Jesus assumed an authority and reign that he did not previously possess? The answer is found in an important distinction. We may distinguish Jesus' essential dominion or reign from his mediatorial dominion or reign. This is how Ebenezer Erskine and James Fisher, two eighteenth-century Scottish commentators on the Westminster Shorter Catechism, express the difference. Q. 17. How manifold is [Jesus'] kingdom? A. It is twofold; his essential and his mediatorial kingdom. Q. 18. What is his essential kingdom? A. It is that absolute and supreme power, which he hath over all the creatures in heaven and earth, essentially and naturally, as God equal with the Father, Psal. ciii. 19, "his kingdom ruleth over all - " Q. 19. What is his mediatorial kingdom? A. It is that sovereign power and authority in and over the church, which is given him as Mediator, Eph. i. 22.52 — Guy Prentiss Waters

the creative power of the judicial system in shaping the law cannot be overlooked entirely. This factor needs to be consciously accepted as one of the elements in shaping the legal system and the laws, however, without least opposing the Supremacy of the Sovereign statutes promulgated in the land.The chasm in the contemporaneous legal scheme and the legislation in Oman harbingers for such a practice to secure the ends of justice, probability of decisions to be given primacy rather than approximation to a model format. — Henrietta Newton Martin

So saving grace, converting grace, for Augustine, is God's giving us a sovereign joy in God that triumphs over all other joys and therefore sways the will. The will is free to move toward whatever it delights in most fully, but it is not within the power of our will to determine what that sovereign joy will be. — John Piper

In comparison with the justice exercised with sovereign power by traditional chiefs, the kings of justice, by the powerful of crooked judgments, Hesiodic justice, going from the decree of Zeus to the order of the world, and from this to peasant vigilance and exactness, to the interplay of good understanding and debts repaid, calls for a whole transfer of sovereignty. Calls for it, but does not record it, for at the time of Works and Days justice is institutionalized only in the hands of the kings of justice. — Michel Foucault

The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, the sun of their microcosm, that upon which all growth depends, from which all power proceeds. — William Harvey

The will is the sovereign faculty and power of the soul; whatever principle acts in it and determines it, that hath the rule. Notwithstanding — John Owen

There is complete hope for terminal illness in the power of the Almighty God. The hands of Jesus are healing hands...the hands of Jesus are saving hands. Jesus brought peace and restoration, reconciliation, power, purpose, love, understading, purity and compatibility with him and the world we live in. we are healed through him. He mends brokenness and gives us back our lives which are stollen by the trials and suffering of this dark world. He is the light and life giving God. We ought to pray in our daily lives to receive from God, his help, upholding power and healing in the Name of Jesus Christ his one and only Son. When we ask from him...then we receive healing, relief from suffering, we stop living in fear of death. Read these books and experience the real presence of the supernatural, almighty sovereign and loving God. — Stellah Mupanduki

Originality is the discovery of how to shed identity before the magic mirror of Antiquity's sovereign power. — Susan Howe

And, suddenly, the bitterness in his heart was swept away by a flood of peace, while new and incredible sources of power were thrown open within him. Again the veil was lifted and he saw, more clearly now, those unknown reaches of his art, trailing eternally in tranquil, sovereign certitude toward the ever unfolding bosom of the Infinite. Could he ever reach them? Came the answer - he would try! And he saw his path fixed forever in the wake of the workers, great and humble, who had seen that vision and held it always in their hearts, having learned in the anguish of renunciation, the inner meaning of the saying: 'Whoso loseth his life shall find it. — Maria Cristina Mena

Drawing prayer circles starts with discerning what God wants, what God wills. And until His sovereign will becomes your sanctified wish, your prayer life will be unplugged from its power supply. Sure, you can apply some of the principles of becoming a circle maker, and they may help you get what you want, but getting what you want isn't the goal; the goal is glorifying God by drawing circles around the promises, miracles, and dreams He wants for you. — Mark Batterson

Until His sovereign will becomes your sanctified wish, your prayer life will be unplugged from its power supply. — Mark Batterson

Money power cannot be separated from democratic power without miscarriage and ensuing frustration - political and economic. Democracy implies the sovereignty of man; and, since man cannot be sovereign without the money power, there can not be democracy under the political money system. — E.C. Riegel

The proposed Constitution, so far from implying an abolition of the State governments, makes them constituent parts of the national sovereignty, by allowing them a direct representation in the Senate, and leaves in their possession certain exclusive and very important portions of sovereign power. This fully corresponds, in every rational import of the terms, with the idea of a federal government. — Alexander Hamilton

Undoubtedly equality of goods is just; but, being unable to cause might to obey justice, men has made it just to obey might. Unable to strengthen justice, they have justified might
so that the just and the strong should unite, and there should be peace, which is the sovereign good. — Blaise Pascal

God doth not govern the world only by his will as an absolute monarch, but by his wisdom and goodness as a tender father. It is not his greatest pleasure to show his sovereign power, or his inconceivable wisdom, but his immense goodness, to which he makes the other attributes subservient. — Stephen Charnock

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers. — John Taylor Gatto

Music hath its land of origin; and yet it is also its own country, its own sovereign power, and all may take refuge there, and all, once settled, may claim it as their own, and all may meet there in amity; and these instruments, as surely as instruments of torture, belong to all of us. — M T Anderson

Now, that the sovereign power and deity, whatsoever it is, should have regard of mankind, is a toy and vanity worthy to be laughed at. — Pliny The Elder

Everyone must feel that he is the supreme arbiter of his own [destiny], that no power on earth shall rise over him, that he is and always shall be sovereign of himself and all relating to his individuality. Then only shall all men realize security of person and property. — Josiah Warren

The whole body of the nation is the sovereign legislative, judiciary, and executive power for itself. The inconvenience of meeting to exercise these powers in person, and their inaptitude to exercise them, induce them to appoint special organs to declare their legislative will, to judge and to execute it. It is the will of the nation which makes the law obligatory. — Thomas Jefferson

A pine cone cannot fall from a tree unless God is involved. A bumblebee cannot pollenate a flower or sting your arm apart from the will of God. Money cannot enter or exit your bank account apart from the sovereignty of God. Little Ernest cannot be born or be buried in that grave just a half-mile from my house apart from God's will. Legislation cannot be passed in this country or in any other apart from God's sovereignty. You hold this book in your hands because God sovereignly allows you to hold this book in your hands. Everything is under His sovereign rule. Some of us believe that God is a bit like the president. He has a lot of power and authority, but there are checks and balances to limit Him. He is limited by our human choices, the events of the future, the wrongs of the past, or by those who do not believe in Him. Some of His legislations could be vetoed. His popularity can ebb and flow. But God is not like that at all. There are no limits to His rule and power. — Justin Buzzard

For centuries it was never discovered that education was a function of the State, and the State never attempted to educate. But when modern absolutism arose, it laid claim to everything on behalf of the sovereign power ... When the revolutionary theory of government began to prevail, and Church and State found that they were educating for opposite ends and in a contradictory spirit, it became necessary to remove children entirely from the influence of religion. — Lord Acton

To realize the Enlightenment ideals of formal equality, the rule of law, freedom of commerce, and religious toleration, Voltaire and many of the other philosophes looked to absolutist monarchs, whose policies they hoped to influence. The support of the philosophes for the expansion of the monarch's sovereign power was tactical. It arose not out of a principled belief in the throne, but out of the recognition that only a strong monarchy had the power to override the resistance to enlightened legislation by the privileged churches, estates, and corporations that made up continental European society. (p. 45) — Jerry Z. Muller

MINISTER, n. An agent of a higher power with a lower responsibility. In diplomacy, an officer sent into a foreign country as the visible embodiment of his sovereign's hostility. — Ambrose Bierce

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; these three alone lead one to sovereign power. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

In truth, a State whose society is not sovereign is no sovereign State at all. Such is the case when a society has no chance to decide the common good, and when it has been denied the basic right to share in power and responsibility — Pope John Paul II

Kenny is a drug, and I've just had the best hit of my life. I'm not losing this addiction. I'm in, all the way, pledging my voluntarily servitude to the gateway of my desire. Kenny was the freedom I was longing for. Love and all this wild pent up desire, proved to be the combination that set me free. But only Kenny had the power to unleash me. She scrubbed the impurity from my life and washed clean the world, so I could see it stark and clear for the very first time. Kenny perfumed my existence with her regal charm, her sovereign splendor. Kenny is in everyway sublime. — Addison Moore

The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland observes that Britain 'has a fundamentally different conception of power to, say, the United States'. It doesn't have a Bill of Rights or a written constitution, or the American idea that 'we the people' are sovereign. Rather, the British system still bears the 'imprint of its origins in monarchy', with power emanating from the top and flowing downwards. Britons remain subjects rather than citizens. Hence their lack of response towards government intrusion. — Luke Harding

Thus, the triumph of patriarchy was neither an accident nor the result of a violent revolution. From the origins of humanity, their biological privilege enabled men to affirm themselves alone as sovereign subjects; they never abdicated this privilege; they alienated part of their existence in Nature and in Woman; but they won it back afterward; condemned to play the role of the Other, woman was thus condemned to possess no more than precarious power: slave or idol, she was never the one who chose her lot. — Simone De Beauvoir

While there are still imperialist aggressors, the state that has no defense power of its own to protect its sovereignty against the internal and external enemies is, in fact, not a fully independent and sovereign state. — Kim Il-sung

The people are the source of governmental power. Along with many religious people, Latter-day Saints affirm that God gave the power to the people, and the people consented to a constitution that delegated certain powers to the government ... The sovereign power is in the people. — Dallin H. Oaks

The very idea of the law in a constitutional republic involves the requisite that it be a rule, a guide, uniform, fixed and equal, for all, till changed by the same high political power which made it. This is what entitles it to its sovereign weight. — Levi Woodbury

Genius is a sovereign power; it forms schools; it lays hold on the spirits of men, with irresistible might; and it exercises an immeasurable influence on the whole condition of human life. This sovereignty of genius is a gift of God, possessed only by his grace. It is subject to no one and is responsible to him alone who has granted it this ascendancy. — Abraham Kuyper

The substance of what I have to say to the disadvantage of the theory and practice of universal suffrage is that it tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad. To say that the sole function of the wise and good is to preach to their neighbors, and that everyone indiscriminately should be left to do what he likes, should be provided with a ratable share of the sovereign power in the shape of the vote, and that the result of this will be the direction of power by wisdom, seems to me the wildest romance that ever got possession of any considerable number of minds. — James Fitzjames Stephen

Every power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign, and includes by force of the term a right to employ all the means requisite ... to the attainment of the ends of such power. — Alexander Hamilton

The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies — Sophie Wahnich

Each state enjoys sovereign power. — Gouverneur Morris

Shouldn't the General Assembly adopt a declaration on the inadmissibility of interference into domestic affairs of sovereign states and nonrecognition of coup d'etats as a method of the change of power? — Sergei Lavrov

Self-imposed limits on sovereign power can disarm mistrust, but provide no guarantee of liberty and property beyond those afforded by the balance between state and private force. — Anthony De Jasay

If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained - then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people. — Walter Lippmann

No single person, including the President of the United States, should ever be given the power to make a medical decision for potentially millions of Americans. Freedom over one's physical person is the most basic freedom of all, and people in a free society should be sovereign over their own bodies. When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies. — Ron Paul

The proprietor, the robber, the hero, the sovereign - for all these titles are synonymous - imposes his will as law, and suffers neither contradiction nor control; that is, he pretends to be the legislative and the executive power at once ... [and so] property engenders despotism ... That is so clearly the essence of property that, to be convinced of it, one need but remember what it is, and observe what happens around him. Property is the right to use and abuse ... if goods are property, why should not the proprietors be kings, and despotic kings - kings in proportion to their facultes bonitaires? And if each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property, absolute king throughout his own domain, how could a government of proprietors be any thing but chaos and confusion? — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

As de Beauvoir put it, religion had given men a God like themselves
a God exclusively male in imagery, which legitimized and sealed their power. How fortunate for men, she said, that their sovereign authority has been vested in them by the Supreme Being. — Sue Monk Kidd

We do not have even 1 percent of that kind of power. Rather, we have 100 percent of the natural freedom that God deemed appropriate to the creatures he made in his own image. Instead of pieces rationed between God (a larger portion) and creatures (a smaller portion), God has his "pie" (sovereign, Creator-style freedom) and we have our own as well from him (dependent, creature-style freedom). Our freedom is like his, but always with greater difference. "In him we live and move and have our being" (Ac 17:28), so even our ability to think, will, and act is dependent on God's sovereign gift. — Michael S. Horton