A Quote by Lech Walesa

Power is only important as an instrument for service to the powerless.

Lech Walesa

Quote Topics

Important Instrument Only Power Powerless Service

Quote Author

Lech Walesa
Polish - Politician
Born: September 29, 1943

It's important if you can do good with power. And Jesus defined power, true power is to serve, to do service, to do the most humble services, and I must still make progress on this path of service because I feel that I don't do everything I should do. That's the sense I have of power.

Pope Francis

For where the instrument of intelligence is added to brute power and evil will, mankind is powerless in its own defense.

Dante Alighieri

The thing is, if you control the Senate meetings, you control the gavel. And the gavel is a very important instrument... an instrument of power. An instrument that establishes the agenda.

Dan Quayle

Conflicts are fueled by the tendency of the powerful to exploit the power and the anger and frustration of the powerless, which turns into violence. International Solidarity Movement activists are attempting to confront the exploitation of power and to bring back hope to the powerless.

Ghassan Andoni

One of our people in the Native community said the difference between white people and Indians is that Indian people know they are oppressed but don’t feel powerless. White people don’t feel oppressed, but feel powerless. Deconstruct that disempowerment. Part of the mythology that they’ve been teaching you is that you have no power. Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.

Winona LaDuke

Power to the people' can only be put into practice when the power exercised by social elites is dissolved into the people. Each individual can then take control of his daily life. If 'Power to the people' means nothing more than power to the 'leaders' of the people, then the people remain an undifferentiated, manipulatable mass, as powerless after the revolution as they were before. In the last analysis, the people can never have power until they disappear as a 'people.

Murray Bookchin

A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements, but not with a corresponding degree of strength, though it is deficient only in the power of maintaining equilibrium. We may therefore say that such an instrument constructed by man is lacking in nothing except the life of the bird, and this life must needs be supplied from that of man.

Leonardo da Vinci

An enlightened teacher teaches you how to gain power. They give you power. They teach you how to shape it so that it becomes an instrument of beauty and not an instrument of unhappiness.

Frederick Lenz

Individual actions are important because in any democracy, citizens need to feel agency. If you feel powerless, totally powerless, it's psychologically dangerous.

Elizabeth May

If you are only concerned with international issues and/or the power of some lobbies that are influencing American policy, then you are isolating yourselves. You are powerless in your mind when you don't understand the meaning and quality of your own real power.

Tariq Ramadan

People who have had power, when they become powerless, are really tragic.... We just allow ourselves to be conditioned by a society so we become as important as we're supposed to be.

Maggie Kuhn

Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar.

Molly Ivins

If you really want to show power in its larger aspects, you need to show the effects on the powerless, for good or ill - the human cost of public works. That's what I try to do, show not only how power works but its effect on people.

Robert Caro

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

Angela Carter

Even if only 2 percent of those assigned to perform military service should announce their refusal to fight, governments would be powerless, they would not dare send such a large number of people to jail.