#power

Enjoy your dreams and empower others to live theirs. ↗

— Joseph Ash

#inspirational-quotes #motivational-inspirational #self-improvement #art

Try telling the boy who’s just had his girlfriend’s name cut into his arm that there’s slippage between the signifier and the signified. Or better yet explain to the girl who watched in the mirror as the tattoo artist stitched the word for her father’s name (on earth as in heaven) across her back that words aren’t made of flesh and blood, that they don’t bite the skin. Language is the animal we’ve trained to pick up the scent of meaning. It’s why when the boy hears his father yelling at the door he sends the dog that he’s kept hungry, that he’s kicked, then loved, to attack the man, to show him that every word has a consequence, that language, when used right, hurts. ↗

— Todd Davis

#language #power #words #inspirational

When I was a child and teenager I read whenever I had the opportunity, but since then I've found it hard to read as much as I'd like, children, work, and pets all providing powerful incentives to escape into a book and a practical reason why I rarely do so. ↗

— Louise Brown

#child #children #escape #found #had

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing. ↗

— Henry Hazlitt

#power-of-words #vocabulary #words #science

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding ↗

— Jacob Bronowski

#knowledge #nature #power #understanding #wisdom

Wisdom consists of knowing how to distinguish the nature of trouble, and in choosing the lesser evil. ↗

— Niccolò Machiavelli

#power #wisdom-in-war #nature

Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#power #courage

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? ↗

— George Orwell

#power #terrorism #torture #terrorism

... in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful. ↗

— David Mitchell

#hatred #ignorance #power #violence #violence

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure. . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us'; but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it, if you don't. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#government #separation-of-powers #us-presidents #president