Quotes & Sayings About The Power Of Silence

People who lack economic and social power often expand their physical impact on the world."
"-In Pursuit of Silence — Doris Lessing

Those individuals who refuse to join in the lies supporting the war are condemned as being unpatriotic, ill-informed, or friends of the enemy. If the propaganda doesn't silence them and they are seen as a sufficient threat to the war machine, the government will enact laws granting power to arrest and punish those refusing to succumb to the propaganda. This will be done not only to punish the direct targets. It will also be done to frighten others who may be considering boldly challenging the authoritarians supporting a war that will only benefit the special interests. — Ron Paul

Silas knew words could have power behind them. Usually it was just a sort of bad luck. He also knew, very early on, that you could never tell when that bad luck would jump up to claim its due, so it was best to be careful. Quiet was safer. He wished his parents had been quieter when they were together. Who knew what might happen when you said something awful to someone else? It was hard to take some words back. Some words stuck and you couldn't shake them off. Silence was better than those kinds of words. Silas had learned that lesson the hard way. — Ari Berk

To be a good storyteller one must be gloriously alive. It is not possible to kindle fresh fires from burned-out embers. I have noticed that the best of the traditional storytellers whom I have heard have been those who live close to the heart of things-to the earth, the sea, wind and weather. They have been those who knew solitude, silence. They have been given unbroken time in which to feel deeply, to reach constantly for understanding. They have come to know the power of the spoken word. These storytellers have been sailors and peasants, wanderers and fisherman. — Ruth Sawyer

Thus his belief was that in a service where feeling could be restrained it ought to be restrained. The power of God was more likely to be known in a solemn stillness than amid noise and excitement. Silence and an expectant seriousness, born of a realisation of the nearness of God, were striking characteristics of the services at Sandfields. — Iain H. Murray

Why? What is his intention? Have you at least discovered that?" "The same as ours, we think," Felixson said. "The getting and keeping of power. He hasn't just taken our treaties, scrolls, and grimoires. He's cleared out all the vestments, all the talismans, all the amulets - " "Hush," Ragowski said suddenly. "Listen." There was a silence among them for a moment, and then a funereal bell chimed softly in the distance. "Oh Christ," Lili said. "It's his bell." The dead man laughed. "He's found you. — Clive Barker

When we keep our silence we gather our power; when we speak we let loose the concentration of quiet reverie. — Bryant McGill

What would you here, unhappy mortal, and for what cause have you left your own land to enter this, which is forbidden to such as you? Can you show reason why my power should not be laid on you in heavy punishment for your insolence and folly?" Then Beren looking up beheld the eyes of Luthien, and his glance went also to the face of Melian; and it seemed to him that words were put into his mouth. Fear left him, and the pride of the eldest house of Men returned to him; and he said: "My fate, O King, led me hither, through perils such as few even of the Elves would dare. And here I have found what I sought not indeed, but finding I would possess for ever. For it is above all gold and silver, and beyond all jewels. Neither rock, nor steel, nor the fires of Morgoth, nor all the powers of the Elf-kingdoms, shall keep from me the treasure that I desire. For Luthien your daughter is the fairest of all the Children of the World." Then silence fell upon the hall ... — J.R.R. Tolkien

Every hour of your life that ticks by, there are numerous points and moments when you can choose to pause - and be aware of your mental and physical state. At any given point, you can freeze the flow that is your life, and be fully conscious for a moment. — Kevin Michel

If time stood still, each moment would be stopped; frozen. Each moment, individually, can be captured as though the world was a giant painting. Each breath, each blink, each glance will be recorded forever. The silence growing with more strength, more will and more enthusiasm. Not even the wind will more, nor the seasons change. The sun will not sleep and the stars forever hidden. Time is a precious element that must not be lost but embraced. — Alexis Hurley

The message of such silence is simple: "we the people" will no longer conspire in supporting the illusions that help corrupt leaders maintain control. By withholding our cheers and falling into silence, we take a small step toward withdrawing the consent that helps maintain abusive power. We no longer affirm, or pretend to affirm, that the national flags and religious symbols in which corrupt leaders wrap themselves have any meaning -- except as an implicit judgment on the duplicity of those leaders. — Parker J. Palmer

It's one of the most basic laws of human nature, isn't it? The more we are denied something, the more we want it. The more silence given to this or that topic, the more power. — Jill McCorkle

I don't say anything. I know the power of silence. I remember my dad saying nothing and I remember his silences more vividly than I remember the things he said. — Caroline Kepnes

The job of the press is to speak truth to power. And yet, for doing our job, we are persecuted. I say that these aggressive and illegal tactics to silence us - inventing arbitrary legal interpretations, over-zealous charges and disproportionate sentences - must not be permitted to succeed. — Sara Harrison

Your silence will never protect you,
Indeed, Silence is the ultimate weapon of power,
but It destroy us first ... — Sahil Nazim

I remember this scene because it was embarrassing to live through it, and because remembering it is a way of knowing that I am half-true to my beliefs when the time comes. I sit silently defending them and I don't sell them out, but I put on a face that lets people think I'm on the winning team, that I'm laughing along with them instead of just standing among them. I save the best parts for myself and savor them in silence. Number three, power of flight. Number four, marauder. Enough vision to really see something. A stack of gold coins and a ledger. People want all kinds of things out of life, I knew early on. — John Darnielle

I came to recognize the landscape of my life in the lives of many women. Their stories and the places they spoke of spanned a world beyond my experience, from mill towns to suburbs, from logging camps to ethnic neighborhoods, from inner cities to Indian reservations. Few shared my place of origin or the events of my life, but many, it seems, shared my experience. Listening to their stories, I came to understand how women can be isolated by circumstances as well as by distance, and how our experiences, though geographically distinct, often translated into the same feelings. Away from the physical presence of my past, I found it easy to argue that what mattered most was the story, the truth of what we tell ourselves, the versions we pass along to our daughters. But as I stood in the living room of my rock house that afternoon, I was again reminded of the enormous power of this prairie, its silence and the whisper I made inside it. I had forgotten how easily one person can be lost here. — Judy Blunt

When silence become silent, it speaks silently but loudly — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly. The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, "doing something"; academics participate in meaningless "debates," etc.; but the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it all. Those in power often prefer even "critical" participation or a critical dialogue to silence, since to engage us in such a "dialogue" ensures that our ominous passivity is broken. The "Bartlebian act" I propose is violent precisely insofar as it entails ceasing this obsessive activity-in it, violence and non-violence overlap (non-violence appears as the highest violence), likewise activity and inactivity (the most radical thing is to do nothing). — Slavoj Zizek

When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term - John Henryism - for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend. — Claudia Rankine

Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an origincal affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a political history of truth would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free
nor error servile
but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this. — Michel Foucault

I found that my wounds begin to heal when the voices of those endangered by silence are given power. The silence of hopelessness, of despair buried in the depths of poverty, violence, racism are more deadly than bullets. The gift of light, in our compassion, our listening, our works of love is the gift of life to ourselves. — Janice Mirikitani

Magic is attracted to good or bad and intensifies them. It fans the sparks that already lie in a man's character. The real power lies in the silence of your heart. — Deepak Chopra

Concentrated power can be always wielded in the interest of the few and at the expense of the many. Government in its last analysis is this power reduced to a science. Governments never lead; they follow progress. When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then. — Lucy Parsons

Not only are animals unable to avail themselves of language to assert their own rights, but many fewer humans have a clear sense of kinship with animals than have a clear sense of kinship with other humans. Among beings with subjective states of awareness, animals are the untouchable caste, those whom human others would rather not acknowledge, let alone render assistance. — Gary Steiner

Human beings have capitalized on the silence of animals, just as certain human beings have historically imposed silence on certain other human beings by denying slaves the right to literacy, denying women the right to own property, and denying both the right to vote. — Gary Steiner

He fought, until he was only his body, the burn of flesh, the pounding of blood, the hot slick of sweat, until everything concentrated into one simple focus, the power of heavy steel, that could bring death. In the moment when he paused - stopped - there was only silence and the sound of his own breath. He turned. Laurent was standing in the doorway, watching him. He — C.S. Pacat

All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows ... — Wendell Berry

I answer her with my silence, understanding the full power of it for the first time. Words are weapons. Weapons are powerful. So are unsaid words. So are unused weapons. — Emily Murdoch

The real power of silence is to keep silent. The real power of silence is in the works of silence! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and giving off a potency of silence. — D.H. Lawrence

If [the heavyweights] become champions they begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville or Conrad or Lawrence or Proust ... Dempsey was alone and Tunney could never explain himself and Sharkey could never believe himself nor Schmeling nor Braddock, and Carnera was sad and Baer an indecipherable clown; great heavyweights like Louis had the loneliness of the ages in their silence, and men like Marciano were mystified by a power which seemed to have been granted them. With the advent, however, of the great modern Black heavyweights, Patterson, Liston, then Clay and Frazier, perhaps the loneliness gave way to what it had been protecting itself against - a surrealistic situation unstable beyond belief. Being a Black heavyweight champion in the second half of the twentieth century (with Black revolutions opening all over the world) was now not unlike being Jack Johnson, Malcolm X and Frank Costello all in one ... — Joyce Carol Oates

In the final analysis, what is it that we call popular, democratic power? Beyond the expressed will of the people, as it is supposedly formulated, there is no appeal; here we meet the absolute, the universal, the indivisible, and the immovable. There is nothing a priori, nothing anterior to democratic power; no ideas of truth, no notions of good or bad, can bind the Popular Will. This 'will' is free in the sense that it stands above all notions of value. It is egalitarian because it is reared on arithmetic equality..It is not open to any appeal, it listens to no demand for grace, no plea for compassion. Like the Sphinx, the Popular Will is immovable in its enigmatic silence. — Tage Lindbom

And it all came to pass, all that she had hoped, but it did not fill her with rapture nor carry her away with the power or the fervor she had expected. She had imagined it all different, and had imagined herself different, too. In dreams and poems everything had been, as it were, beyond the sea; the haze of distance had mysteriously veiled all the restless mass of details and had thrown out the large lines in bold relief, while the silence of distance had lent its spirit of enchantment. It had been easy then to feel the beauty; but now that she was in the midst of it all, when every little feature stood out and spoke boldly with the manifold voices of reality, and beauty was shattered as light in a prism, she could not gather the rays together again, could not put the picture back beyond the sea. Despondently she was obliged to admit to herself that she felt poor, surrounded by riches that she could not make her own. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode the meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning. — Malidoma Patrice Some

Concealed within the stones are frozen fires. Borne on vast waves of polychrome gas that attracted, discarded, formed, and reformed patterns of infinite complexity, the living sparks had taken their allotted places. They were burning before the beginning. They will burn after the end. Their fire is impervious to time. Time is a human concept. Creation is on a different scale. Every spark was a syllable spoken into silence, a miniscule portion of the great Word that became a roar of limitless power and exploded to create a universe. From chaos, cosmos. — Morgan Llywelyn

You see, 'The Look of Silence' is the first film ever made where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power. It's normally never done because it is too dangerous. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied sould of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech. In the same way to say a little is often to tell more than to say. — Thomas Hardy

The decision to rely heavily on high-altitude air power, target urban infrastructure and repeatedly attack heavily populated towns and villages has reflected a deliberate trade-off of the lives of American pilots and soldiers, not with those of their declared Taliban enemies, but with Afghan civilians ... There will be no official two-minute silence for the Afghan dead, no newspaper obituaries or memorial services attended by the prime minister, as there were for the victims of the twin towers. — Seumas Milne

There was silence. Then as if to refresh the power of destruction, the wind rose and the waves rose and through the house there lifted itself a sullen wave of doom which curled and crashed and the whole earth seemed ruining and washing away in water. — Virginia Woolf

I will deck thee with trophies, garlands of my defeat. It is never in my power to escape unconquered.
I surely know my pride will go to the wall, my life will burst its bonds in exceeding pain, and my empty heart will sob out in music like a hollow reed, and the stone will melt in tears.
I surely know the hundred petals of a lotus will not remain closed for ever and the secret recess of its honey will be bared.
From the blue sky an eye shall gaze upon me and summon me in silence. Nothing will be left for me, nothing whatever, and utter death shall I receive at thy feet. — Rabindranath Tagore

Silence is the first thing within the power of the enslaved to shatter. From that shattering, everything else spills forth.
Are you ready to shatter the silence?
Share your secrets. — Ellen Hopkins

In the silences I make in the midst of the turmoil of life I have appointments with God. From these silences I come forth with spirit refreshed, and with a renewed sense of power. I hear a voice in the silences, and become increasingly aware that it is the voice of God. — David Brainerd

As I walked by his side homeward, I read well in his iron silence all he felt towards me: the disappointment of an austere and despotic nature, which has met resistance where it expected submission - the disapprobation of a cool, inflexible judgment, which has detected in another feelings and views in which it has no power to sympathise: in short, as a man, he would have wished to coerce me into obedience: it was only as a sincere Christian he bore so patiently with my perversity, and allowed so long a space for reflection and repentance. — Charlotte Bronte

There is something worse than holding our silence while the lost of this world run headlong into hell: the crime of preaching to a different gospel than the one passed down to the saints. For this reason, we must shun the gospel of contemporary evangelicalism, for it is a watered-down, culturally carved, truncated gospel that allows men to hold to a form of godliness while denying its power, to profess to know God while denying Him with their deeds, and to call Jesus "Lord, Lord," while not doing the Father's will.15 Woe to us if we do not preach the gospel, but even greater woe is due us if we preach it incorrectly!16 — Paul David Washer

Those men and women of Yangzhou died a hundred years ago, Tian Haoli, and nothing can be done to change that. But the past lives on in the form of memories, and those in power are always going to want to erase and silence the past, to bury the ghosts. Now that you know about the past, you're no longer an innocent bystander. If you do not act you are complicit with the Emperor and his Blood Drops in this new act of violence, this deed of erasure. Like Wang Xiuchu, you're now a witness. Like him, you must choose what to do. You must decide if, on the day you die, you will regret your choice. — Ken Liu

Howard Altmann has found a way to make language transform itself. If the elusive moment between I and Thou could speak, it might be one of his quietly amazing lines-'you ask the silence to invert itself / like a gymnast in the dark ... ' Without a trace of rhetoric, In This House reminds us of the power of poetry: to show us how to live in a world in which we are strangers. It's a thrill to come close to such an original and deeply realized art. — Dennis Nurkse

I did it because he wasn't fair to you. Because you deserve credit for what you've done. Because he needs to realize you aren't the person he's always thought you were. He needs to see you for who you really are, not for all the ideas and preconceptions he's built up around you." The power in Adrian's gaze was so strong that I kept talking. I was nervous about meeting that stare in silence. Also, part of me was afraid that if I pondered my own words too hard, I'd discover they were just as much about my own father and me as Adrian and his. "It should have been enough for you to tell him who you are - show him who you are - but he wouldn't listen — Richelle Mead

instead of mourning, instead of a moment of silence or a hateful, islamophobic message, how about today we make the world a little brighter?
be kinder. be a little gentler, with yourself and others. take more pictures. tell more jokes. be a better human.
today is a lot more than a tragedy. today is a birthday. a day of suicide awareness. a wedding. a birth. a new job. today is a kiss and someone on a tarred over warehouse roof whispering about the day the earth stood still and the day it began spinning again.
be kind. just be kind. it's time we took this day back for the wild ones, for the fiery eyes, for the happy and the brave and the new. no more mourning. let it just be a sunday. — Taylor Rhodes

Clary wasn't sure what she'd expected -exclamations of delight, perhaps a smattering of applause. Instead there was silence, broken only when Jace said, "Somehow, I thought it would be bigger."
Clary looked at the Cup in her hand. It was the size, perhaps, of an ordinary wineglass, only much heavier. Power thrummed through it, like blood through living veins. "It's a perfectly nice size," she said indignantly.
"Oh, it's big enough," he said patronizingly, "but somehow I was expecting something ... you know." He gestured with his hands, indicating something roughly the size of a house cat.
"It's the Mortal Cup, Jace, not the Mortal Toilet Bowl," said Isabelle. — Cassandra Clare

Abandoning the flatland ages past, And finding mountains much more to their taste, They toil in labyrinthine caverns, dense With gases that are metal's noble source; 10770 They separate, combine, test, trying to Discover things undreamt of hitherto. By spirit power, subtly, they construct Forms clear and crystalline, without defect; Then in the crystal's eternal silence peering, Perceive what in the upper world is occurring. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator's first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail. JUDITH LEWIS HERMAN Trauma and Recovery — Jon Krakauer

Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously. — Lance Morrow

1. The End of Summer The moon rose high in the sky. Rylie's veins pulsed with its power. It pressed against her bones, strained against her muscles, and fought to erupt from her flesh. A wolf's howl broke the silence of the night. It called to her, telling her to change. "No," she whimpered, digging fingernails into her shins hard enough to draw blood. "No." Rylie burned. The fire was going to consume her. The moon called her name, but it would be the end of her humanity if she obeyed it. She would never see her family again. She would never see her friends or graduate high school. Rylie might not die, but her life would be over. Yet if she didn't change, the boy she loved would die at the jaws of the one who changed her. Rylie had to lose him or lose her entire life. But was love worth becoming a monster? — S.M. Reine

In his time since Sarnak, Froi had come to learn as much about the power of silence as the power of words. — Melina Marchetta

Religious controversy is the offspring of arrogance and folly; that true piety is most laudably expressed by silence and submission; that man, ignorant of his own nature, should not presume to scrutinize the nature of his God; and that it is sufficient for us to know, that power and benevolence are the perfect attributes of the Deity. — Edward Gibbon

THE SUN CAME UP a baleful smear in the sky, not quite shapeless, in fact able to assume the appearance of a device immediately recognizable yet unnamable, so widely familiar that the inability to name it passed from simple frustration to a felt dread, whose intricacy deepened almost moment to moment . . . its name a word of power, not to be spoken aloud, not even to be remembered in silence. All around lay ambushes of the bad ice, latent presences, haunting all transaction, each like the infinitesimal circle converging toward zero that mathematicians now and then find use for. A silver-gray, odorless, silent exit from the upper world. . . . The sun might be visible from time to time, with or without clouds, but the sky was more neutral-density gray than blue. Out on the promontory grew some even-textured foliage, in this light a blazing, virtually shadowless green, and breaking down at the base of the headland was the sea-green sea, the ice-green, glass-green sea. Hunter — Thomas Pynchon

Where Damien and I are concerned, there is never just silence. There is heat and electricity and lust and need, all harnessing the power of the universe to pull us together. And how can I be expected to fight physics? — J. Kenner

Firestar, what's wrong?" Firestar shook his head to clear it of apprehension. It was a relief to go right back to the beginning, and tell Cinderpelt about the dream that had come to him as he lay beside the Moonstone. Cinderpelt sat beside him and listened in silence, her steady gaze never leaving his face. "Bluestar told me, 'Four will become two. Lion and tiger will meet in battle, and blood will rule the forest,'" Firestar finished. "And then blood oozed out of the hill of bones and started to fill the hollow. Blood everywhere . . . Cinderpelt, what does it all mean?" "I don't know," Cinderpelt confessed. "StarClan has not shown me any of this. Just as they have the power to show me what will happen, so they can choose not to share with me. I'm sorry, Firestar - but I'll keep thinking about it, and maybe something will happen to make it clearer soon." She pushed her nose against Firestar's fur to comfort him, but though Firestar was grateful for her — Erin Hunter

The shame of the U.S.S. Liberty incident is that our sailors were treated as though they were enemies, rather than the patriots and heroes that they were. There is no other incident
beyond Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty
that shows the power of the Israeli Lobby by being able to silence successive American governments. Allowing the lies told by the Israelis and their minions in the U.S. is disheartening to all of us who are proud of our servicemen. — James Abourezk

Racial tensions are rife with pride - the pride of white supremacy, the pride of black power, the pride of intellectual analysis, the pride of anti-intellectual scorn, the pride of loud verbal attack, and the pride of despising silence, the pride that feels secure, and the pride that masks fear. Where pride holds sway, there is no hope for the kind of listening and patience and understanding and openness to correction that relationships require. — John Piper

When I'm the speaker, I know that special moment [just before speaking] is the only time I will have the entire audience's full attention. Unless an alien spaceship crash-lands on stage midway through the talk, the silence before I begin is the most powerful moment I have. What defines how well I'll do starts with how I use the power of that moment. — Scott Berkun

It may be that one of our great faults in prayer is that we talk too much and listen too little. When prayer is at its highest we wait in silence for God's voice to us; we linger in His presence for His peace and His power to flow over us and around us; we lean back in His everlasting arms and feel the serenity of perfect security in Him. — William Barclay

The means of choice:
She might choose to ascend
The falling dream,
By some angelic power without a name
Reverse the motion, plunge into upwardness,
Know height without an end,
Density melt to air, silence yield a voice
Within her fall she felt the pull of Grace. — May Sarton

I contribute to the dead of winter and the moans of silence, blood trails are music to my ears ... I'm a gut pile addict ... The pig didn't know I was there ... it's my kick ... I love shafting animals ... it's rock 'n' roll power. — Ted Nugent

A show of power is not the same as silent power. — T.F. Hodge

Most of the crimes which disturb the internal peace of society are produced by the restraints which the necessary, but unequal, laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind, by confining to a few the possession of those objects that are coveted by many. Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries, and the fear of future dangers, all contribute to inflame the mind, and to silence the voice of pity. From such motives almost every page of history has been stained with civil blood.... — Edward Gibbon

Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality; silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence. — Samantha Power

Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened, and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in the words of a journalist, 'another wave of really aggressive, you know, violent personal threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And one man in Ontario took the step of making an online video game where you could punch Anita's image on the screen. And if you punched it multiple times, bruises and cuts would appear on her image.' The difference between these online gamers and the Taliban men who, last October, tried to murder fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai for speaking out about the right of Pakistani women to education is one of degree. Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan. — Rebecca Solnit

If we understood the awesome power of our words, we would prefer silence to almost anything negative. — Betty Eadie

The older a wizard grows, the more silent he becomes, like a woody vine growing over time to choke a garden path, deep and full of moss and snakes, running everywhere, impenetrable. — F.T. McKinstry

Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, and loneliness. You will see that the world is not on your shoulders after all. Your will find yourself, and God will find you in new ways. Silence also brings Sabbath to you. It completes solitude, for without it you cannot be alone. Far from being a mere absence, silence allows the reality of God to stand in the midst of your life. God does not ordinarily compete for our attention. In silence we come to attend. Lastly, fasting is done that we many consciously experience the direct sustenance of God to our body and our whole person. — Dallas Willard

Because they were frightened of me." She crossed her arms as best she could. "Not because they respected me."
"I think we can both agree that fear is a type of respect."
"Perhaps." She looked slightly placated. "Everyone I meet who knows of my power fears me. Maybe I'm the most respected person in the world."
"Maybe," I agreed, and thunder rolled overhead. Ilsa glanced upwards, her features illuminated by a flicker of lightning.
We sat in silence for a few minutes longer, before I jumped down from the wagon.
"You don't fear me, though," Ilsa called as I searched for another stick. "I can tell. You think yourself more powerful."
She jumped as lightning cracked through the sky overhead. I heard several prisoners further back, exclaiming loudly.
"Maybe," I repeated, and started work on another dance as Ilsa watched. — Aprille Legacy

And again the news offered no news: On CNN, a rerun of Larry King interviewing the widowed and the suffering. On CNN2, a rerun of Larry King interviewing a fatherless son. On CNN3, a rerun of Flight 11 flying toward the first tower, in slow motion. On CNN4, a rerun of the tower collapsing, in slow motion, and again the towers fell, again people jumped and died. On CNN5, a rerun of Larry King interviewing a motherless daughter, a daughterless father, interviewing the motherless, fatherless, wifeless, husbandless, childless, shameless
disgusted, Bill pressed POWER and beheaded King, exiled CNN, and the world went dark. They sat relieved in the silence and dark. Not much road traffic now, but somewhere in the distant overhead the honk and flap of southbound geese, instinct bound, in vees for victory. The turkey was still on the table; the sides were still out. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are tired come home. — Pearl Abraham

WE ARE MEMBERS OF THE GUILTY REMNANT. WE HAVE TAKEN A VOW OF SILENCE. WE STAND BEFORE YOU AS LIVING REMINDERS OF GOD'S AWESOME POWER. HIS JUDGMENT IS UPON US. — Tom Perrotta

I recognize the power of silence in an extroverted world but there is a time for silence and a time to speak up about things that matter that continue to be left unsaid. — Matthew Donnelly

Silence can answer the question words may fail to answer. If you want to know what silence can do, keep silence! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I have seen A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract Of inland ground, applying to his ear The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell; To which, in silence hushed, his very soul listened intensely; for from within were heard Murmurings whereby the monitor expressed Mysterious union with its native sea. Even such a shell the universe itself Is to the ear of faith; and there are times, I doubt not, when to you it doth impart Authentic tidings of invisible things, Of ebb and flow, and ever enduring power, And central peace, subsisting at the heart Of endless Agitation. — William Wordsworth

These years in silence and reflection made me stronger and reminded me that acceptance has to come from within and that this kind of truth gives me the power to conquer emotions I didn't even know existed. — Ricky Martin

The struggle for power had reached a new stage; it was fought with scientific formulas. The weapons vanished in the abyss like fleeting images, like pictures one throws into the fire ...
When new models were displayed to the masses at the great parades on Red Square in Moscow or elsewhere, the crowds stood in reverent silence and then broke into jubilant shouts of triumph ...
Though the display was continual, in this silence and these shouts something evil, old as time, manifested itself in man, who is an outsmarter and setter of traps. Invisible, Cain and Tubalcain marched past in the parade of phantoms. — Ernst Junger

See thou, whatsoever be thy name
whether Fate, Life, or Devil! I cast thee down my gauntlet, I challenge thee to battle! Men of faint heart may bow before thy mysterious power, thy face of stone may inspire them with dread, in thy unbroken silence they may discern the birth of calamity and an impending avalanche of woe. But I am daring and strong, and I challenge thee to battle! Let us draw our swords, and join our bucklers, and rain such blows upon each other's crests as shall cause the very earth to shake again! Ha! Come forth and fight with me! — Leonid Andreyev

Much like books, she could tell how voiceless things had provided a brand of companionship more compatible to his nature than human friendship had ever been. These things, locked in their inanimate ways, fed him ideas, she thought. They whispered their tales to him through unmoving lips and he listened, opening himself to their world so much more than any normal passerby. That much was evident in the way he'd taken the photos, as if he'd caught each soulless thing in a candid moment of secret animation. Like they'd sensed him coming and so turned themselves his way because they knew that he held the power to translate their silence into words. — Kelly Creagh

Certain coincidence is wonderful. Certain meetings are memorable. Sometimes you meet some people for just a moment and they leave indelible footprints on your mind. They give you the reasons to ponder over and over. They become your food for thought. Though they go, their presence is felt within the innermost of the heart and the soul; especially when such people were a reason for a smile, or they were a perfect fit for a vacuum or probably they were a heavenly sent or maybe they were an epitome of a great union; when their light could shine to brighten the dark side of our lives; when they knew how to arouse interest even in the face of dull atmosphere; when they did understand silence and know the value and power of words; when even their absence is felt more than their presence. You can't just forget about such people. Though they leave, they live within our hearts, mind, body and soul. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

What we do not see, what most of us never suspect of existing, is the silent but irresistible power which comes to the rescue of those who fight on in the face of discouragement. — Napoleon Hill

On every unauthoritative exercise of power by the legislature must the people rise in rebellion or their silence be construed into a surrender of that power to them? If so, how many rebellions should we have had already? — Thomas Jefferson

When Group is over, we all pile into the same elevator and nobody says a word. That's the strange thing about elevators, it's like they have this power to silence you. I've just been in group therapy where people will reveal the most intimate details of their lives to complete strangers, yet in the elevator nobody can say a word. — Augusten Burroughs

He had somehow, with all his modesty, the rare faculty of controlling his superiors as well as his subordinates. He outfaced Stanton, captivated the President, and even compelled acquiescence or silence from that dread source of paralyzing power, the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War. — Joshua Chamberlain

But then twitching nervously in the presence of a librarian wasn't an uncommon response - librarians, like ministers of religion, and poets, and people with serious mental health disorders, can make people nervous. Librarians possess a kind of occult power, an aura. They could silence people with just a glance. At least, they did in Israel's fantasies. In Israel's fantasies, librarians were mild-mannered superheroes, with extrasensory perceptions and a highly developed sense of responsibility who demanded respect from everyone they met. In reality, Israel couldn't silence even Mrs Onions on her mobile phone when she was disturbing other readers. — Ian Sansom

Silence is the ultimate weapon of power. — Charles De Gaulle

No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Out of purity and silence comes the word of power. — Swami Vivekananda

If we understood the power of our thoughts, we would guard them more closely. If we understood the awesome power of our words, we would prefer silence to almost anything negative. In our thoughts and words we create our own weaknesses and our own strengths. Our limitations and joys begin in our hearts. We can always replace negative with positive. — Betty Eadie

There there is nothing like a wilderness journey for rekindling the fires of life. Simplicity is part of it. Cutting the cackle. Transportation reduced to leg - or arm - power, eating irons to one spoon. Such simplicity, together with sweat and silence, amplify the rhythms of any long journey, especially through unknown, untattered territory. And in the end such a journey can restore an understanding of how insignificant you are
and thereby set you free. — Colin Fletcher

An even more pointed example of the the power of the silence tabu in libraries occurred in Duluth in 1981. The police were pursuing a fugitive from justice who ran into the public library. Uniformed police surrounded the building, and the library director was notified that only unobtrusive plainclothesmen were entering the building. Their instructions: "When you find him, overpower him. Quietly." It was done, and only a few people in the crowded building saw a handcuffed man being ushered past the checkout counter. "See," one librarian remarked quietly to an amazed person, "that's what happens when you don't pay your book fines. — Ray B. Browne

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible. — James Joyce

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence. — Robert Fripp

True success is a silence inner process that can empower the mind, heart and soul through strong aspiration for great achievement. — Nur Sakinah Thomas

Not only a truer knowledge, but a greater power comes to one in the quietude and silence of a mind that, instead of bubbling on the surface, can go to its own depths and listen. — Sri Aurobindo

What good I thought I could do, all alone, against thousands of years of mistrust and the power of a Demonlord, I cannot now imagine: but such are the dreams of youth, too gloriously stupid to realise what cannot be done.
And without those dreams, how should we ever accomplish the impossible? — Elizabeth Kerner

If Spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous and the perpetual exercise of God's power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow