A Quote by J. William Fulbright

Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.

J. William Fulbright

Quote Topics

Also Itself Omnipotence Power Take Tends Virtue

Quote Author

J. William Fulbright
American - Politician
April 9, 1905 - February 9, 1995

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue, and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor.

J. William Fulbright

To be alive is power; existence in itself; without a further function; omnipotence.

Emily Dickinson

Rationalists are admirable beings, rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. Attribution of omnipotence to reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is worship of stock and stone believing it to be God.

Mahatma Gandhi

Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life.

Andre Breton

When religion is good, it will take care of itself. When it is not able to take care of itself, and God does not see fit to take care of it, so that it has to appeal to the civil power for support, it is evidence to my mind that its cause is a bad one.

Benjamin Franklin

Most things at their core are love stories anyway, whether they realize it or not. It's hilarious, the more seriously a show tries to take itself and detach itself from that, the more that the love story generally tends to come forward.

Rege-Jean Page

Power tends to protect itself merely to maintain its own status and control. Principle gives up power for the sake of creating the best public policy.

Dan Webster

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stress, in addition to being itself, was also the cause of itself, and the result of itself.

Hans Selye

It is not only spirits who punish the evil, the soul brings itself to judgment: and also it is not right for those who endure for ever to attain everything in a short time: and also, there is need of human virtue. If punishment followed instantly upon sin, men would act justly from fear and have no virtue.

Sallust

To make a division of power effectual, a veto in one form or another is indispensable. The right of each to judge for itself of the extent of the power allotted to its share, and to protect itself in its exercise, is what, in reality, is meant by a division of power.

John C. Calhoun

Everything that from eternity has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the deeds of time simply are the struggles for Spirit to know Itself, to find Itself, be for Itself, and finally unite itself to Itself; it is alienated and divided, but only so as to be able thus to find itself and return to Itself...As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called 'I'; as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Virtue debases itself in justifying itself.

Voltaire

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

Hosea Ballou

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.