Theme

Philosophy quotes about power

Power is the capacity to affect others and to shape what counts as possible—central to politics and ethics.

Why this theme matters

Philosophers analyze domination, authority, freedom, and the micro-politics of everyday life. Power can enable justice or crush it.

In the history of philosophy

From classical statecraft and Legalism to modern liberalism, Marxism, and Foucaultian analysis, the theme links institutions to the soul.

Thinkers in this collection

Francis Bacon , Han Feizi , Thomas Hobbes , John Stuart Mill , Dhammapada , Thomas Aquinas , John Locke , Wang Fuzhi

Frequently asked questions

What is power in philosophy?

It is the ability to produce effects—especially over people—through force, authority, ideology, or structure.

Is power always bad?

No. Many theories distinguish empowering capacity from domination, and ask how power can be accountable.

Where are philosophy quotes about power?

Browse this theme and related pages on politics, freedom, and responsibility.

  1. For knowledge itself is power.
  2. When the age changes, affairs change; when affairs change, preparations must change.
  3. During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War.
  4. The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
  5. Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is an eternal law.
  6. Good is to be done and pursued, and evil avoided.
  7. Where there is no law, there is no freedom.
  8. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
  9. Human knowledge and human power meet in one.
  10. The great method of ordering the world lies in discerning the times and gauging the situation.
  11. Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
  12. Force is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.
  13. Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.
  14. She honorably presides over the mysteries of philosophy.
  15. The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.
  16. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
  17. The statesman and the king are like the physician: they seek the health of the city as the physician seeks the health of the body.
  18. The Law has urged us to observe beings and directed us to seek knowledge of them by means of demonstration.
  19. Royal authority and large-scale dynastic power are attained only through group feeling (ʿaṣabiyya).
  20. The Law as a whole aims at two things: the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body.
  21. The foundation of all foundations and the pillar of all sciences is to know that there is a First Being who brought every existing thing into being.
  22. Contemporary African philosophy, inasmuch as it remains an ethnophilosophy, has been built up essentially for a European public. The African ethnophilosopher's discourse is not intended for Africans.
  23. A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.
  24. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.
  25. My turn to state an equation: colonization = "thingification."
  26. Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape… No human contact, but relations of domination and submission.
  27. Before the ego cogito there is an ego conquiro; “I conquer” is the practical foundation of “I think.”
  28. From the “I conquer” applied to the Aztec and Inca world and all America, from the “I enslave” applied to Africans … from this “I” appears the Cartesian ego cogito.