With a nation, as with a boxer, one of the greatest assurances of safety is to add reach to power.

-Acheson, Dean Gooderham
Alluding to US bases in Europe. Quoted in  James B Reston Deadline (1991).

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.Great men are almost always bad men. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

-Acton of Aldenham
  Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 3  Apr.

In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember 3 the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.

-Adams, Abigail
  Letter to  John  Adams, 31 Mar.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the race.

-Adams, Henry Brooks
  Letter to Charles Francis  Adams,  Jr,11  Apr.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

-Adams, Henry Brooks
  The Education of Henry  Adams, ch.7.

The spacious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great Original proclaim. Th'unwearied sun from day to day Does his Creator's power display; And publishes to every land The work of an Almighty hand.

-Addison,Joseph
  In The Spectator, no.465, 23  Aug.

   Conceit spoils the finest genius†and the great charm of all power is modesty.

-Alcott, Louisa May
  Little Women, pt.1, ch.7.

I am really persuaded that if we were to inquire of all the Cities which†have fallen by Siege into the Power of new Masters, who it was that subjected and overcame them, they would tell you, the Architect; and that they were strong enough to have despised the armed Enemy, but not to withstand the Shocks of the Engines, the Violence of the Machines and the Force of other Instruments of War with whichthe Architect, distressed, demolished and ruinated them.On the contrary, they would inform you that their greatest Defense lay in the Art and Assistance of the Architect.

-Alberti, Leon Battista
^2  Architecttura (translated by James Leoni,1755).

Theyare a great tradition†gliding in and out of the corridors of power with the opulent calm of angelfish swimming through an aquarian castle.

-Allen, Henry Southworth
  Of presidential advisers. In the Washington Post, 3  Jan.

   Power to the people.

-Anonymous
  US Black Panther movement slogan.

Black power.

-Anonymous
  US black civil rights slogan coined by Stokely Carmichael.

Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and for thepurpose of making mana political animal she has endowed him alone among the animals with the power of reasoned speech.

-Aristotle
c.330  BC  Politics, bk.1, ch.2,1253b (translated by T  A Sinclair).

Knowledge is power

-Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans
  Meditationes sacrae,'De Haresibus' (Of Heresies).

Those who have handled scienceshave been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use; thereasonersresemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance.But the bee takes a middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy.

-Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans
  Novum Organum bk.1, aphorism 95.

   It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty.

-Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans
  Essays, no.11,'Of Great Place'.

New nobility is but the act of power, but ancient nobility is the act of time.

-Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans
  Essays, no.14,'Of Nobility'.

Political economy tracesinanabstract way theeffects of the desire to be rich; and nations must nowadays abound in that passion if theyare to have much poweror respect in the world.

-Bagehot,Walter
  'Preliminaries of Political Economy', collected in Economic Studies (1880).

Men of business have a solid judgment, a wonderful guessing power of what isgoing to happen, each in his own trade, but they have never practised themselves in reasoning out their judgments and in supporting their guesses byargument; probably if they did so, some of the finer and correcter parts of their anticipations would vanish.

-Bagehot,Walter
  'Postulates of English Political Economy', in Economic Studies (1880).

California's power to cloud men's minds must never be Baldwin forgot.Under its spell we submitted foreight yearstothe governance of Ronald Reagan, who had trouble distinguishing history from old movie plots.

-Baker, Russell Wayne
  'Don't Look Back', in the NewYork Times,1  Aug.

The papers conducted by Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook are not newspapers in the ordinary acceptance of theterm.Theyare engines of propaganda for the constantly-changing policies, desires, personal wishes, and personal likes and dislikes of two men† What the proprietorship of those papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibilityöthe prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

-Baldwin (of Bewdley), Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl
  Speech,18 Mar. Rudyard Kipling, Baldwin's cousin, is alleged to be the original author of this famous phrase. Harold Macmillan claimed that the Duke of Devonshire (his father-in- law) responded 'Good God, that's done it, he's lost us the tarts.'