Quotes about Power and Social Change

Introduction

Here is a collection of quotes about power and social change collated by the Commons Librarians. Please contact us if you have a quote to add.

Power Quotes

The key is to find the places where you are powerful, where you are hopeful and where you have the opportunity to make a difference. – Aidan Ricketts, Source

We don’t necessarily have power simply because we’re campaigning for outcomes that are intrinsically ethical or moral. That’s where the craft of community organising to translate widely-held values into power comes in. – James Whelan, Source

Build your power as well as reduce the power of your opposition. Both matter. – Jess Beckerling, Source

Build power, but never at the expense of your authenticity, ethics and a greater sense of what is right and just. – Jess Beckerling, Source

Leaders are people who bring others with them, who are ready for action, who have a sense of anger and injustice and an eye for understanding power. These relationship-based networks – or deep coalitions – are a form of power. – Amanda Tattersall, Source

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent. – Jonathan Swift, Source

With great power there must also come great responsibility. – Stan Lee, Source

The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace. – Mahatma Gandhi, Source

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just. – Blaise Pascal, Source

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move. – Ossie Davis, Source

The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm. – Milton Friedman, Source

All struggles against oppression in the modern world begin by redefining what had previously been considered private, non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power. – Seyla Benhabib, Source

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. – John Dalberg-Acton, Source

Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegal and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive. – Alexis de Tocqueville, Source

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. – Aung San Suu Kyi, Source

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power. – George Bernard Shaw, Source

Power doesn’t corrupt people, people corrupt power. – William Gaddis, Source

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. – Frederick Douglass, Source

For me, the big benefit in organising as an approach to change is that it transforms the power landscape. People move from thinking that all the power is with the politicians, to realising that they can create power. – Anita Tang, Source

Power is nothing unless you can turn it into influence. – Condoleezza Rice, Source

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. – George Orwell, Source

When activists try to change people’s lives, or tackle the injustices that they face, we are actually trying to change power equations. – Srilatha Batliwala, Source

We think power is something that has to be changed outside, in the larger society or community – not within ourselves. – Srilatha Batliwala, Source

If we want to create permanent change in power structures – or dismantle them completely – we can succeed only by revealing and bringing down the hidden and invisible forces that are holding them up. – Srilatha Batliwala, Source

Ideology is the most powerful tool created to protect a power structure, because it is the mechanism through which everyone is convinced to participate in that oppressive system, rather than toppling it – they are taught to accept their place in society. –  Srilatha Batliwala, Source

Social power is the capacity of different individuals or groups to determine who gets what, who does what, who decides what, and who sets the agenda. –  Srilatha Batliwala, Source

In the organizing approach, specific injustices and outrage are the immediate motivation, but the primary goal is to transfer power from the elite to the majority, from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. – Jane McAlevey, Source

What is almost never attempted is the absolutely essential corollary: a parallel careful, methodical, systematic, detailed analysis of power structures among the ordinary people who are or could be brought into the fight. – Jane McAlevey, Source

The first step toward creating a dialogue may be to shout and speak the truth. Then comes the strategic question: can we build the power we need to create the conditions in which real dialogue can occur? And that’s when movements have to be resourceful enough to find new sources of power. Substituting dialogue for equality is a sham and winds up being a play-act. Power, as it is, is never ceded willingly. – Marshall Ganz, Source

If you need what I’ve got more than I need what you’ve got. Who’s got the power? – Marshall Ganz, Source

Power is a relationship that is not a thing. It is a relationship between need and resource, interest and resource. – Marshall Ganz, Source

So the power question requires asking: First, who holds resources to effect the change we want, whether it’s changing a law, policy, practice, language? Second, what resources do our people have, whether it’s time, commitment, money, courage to go to jail, discipline? Third, how can we combine our resources to influence what those in power need, whether it’s business as usual, getting elected, staying out of court, keeping a reputation or just minimizing cost? – Marshall Ganz, Source

Power always depends for its strength and existence upon a replenishment of its sources by the cooperation of numerous institutions and people – cooperation that does not have to continue. – Gene Sharp, theorist of non-violent resistance & founder of the Albert Einstein Institute, Source

Power compounds by making the already powerful even more powerful, and it justifies itself as people in power find ways of making arguments to sustain and legitimize their power. Those two factors alone could create a doom-loop of power becoming increasingly concentrated, but what saves us is that power is also infinite. Power is something that any one of us can create. – Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University, Source

What are the consequences when people refuse their roles and become disruptive? Perhaps disruption is not only born of desperation but is in fact a source of power. – Frances Fox Piven, political scientist, sociologist & activist, Source

Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes.

In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice.

One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love.

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.

― Martin Luther King Jr, Source

Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages. It is a social force any group can utilize by accumulating its elements in a planned, deliberate campaign to organize it under its own control. – Martin Luther King Jr., Source

I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good. – Martin Luther King, Jr., Source

We can all get more together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power. Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to effect change, and we need power. – Martin Luther King Jr., Source

What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. –  Paul Hawken, Source

A democracy cannot thrive where power remains unchecked and justice is reserved for a select few. – John Lewis, Source

There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about. – Margaret J. Wheatley, Source

In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions. – Margaret J. Wheatley, Source

In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it. – Marianne Williamson, Source

Power concedes nothing without an organized demand. – Charlene Carruthers, Source

When you get these jobs you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game. – Toni Morrison, Source

The best people to have power are the ones who don’t want it. – Kit Harington, Source

Power is neither good nor evil. It just is. It’s what people do with power that matters. – C.J. Redwine, Source

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment. – Mahatma Gandhi, Source

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. – Michel Foucault, Source

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. – Michel Foucault, Source

Power never takes a back step – only in the face of more power. – Malcolm X, Source

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself. – Gloria Steinem, Source

Social movements create change by building collective power to win an agenda that serves the common interest. Change lasts when it becomes embedded as social norms valued by a majority of the public, and in institutional, financial and political systems. – Kathryn McCallum, Source

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces. – Etienne de la Boetie, Source

So to make change in the democratic process and to advance the collective good we need to confront and transform power. We need to expose invisible forms of power that exclude certain issues or groups from even being heard. And we need to transform the tendency of people to think of themselves as powerless. – Kathryn McCallum, Source

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. – Marianne Williamson, Source

One of the most dangerous things to believe about power, is that you have none. – Liz Scarfe, Source

If people don’t think they have the power to solve their problems, they won’t even think about how to solve them. – Saul Alinsky, Source

Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. – Saul Alinsky, Source

The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use; of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public. – John F. Kennedy, Source

In this short Life that only lasts an hour
How much – how little – is within our power – Emily Dickinson, Source

Explore Further

Quotes

• A collection of nonviolence quotes
• Marshall Ganz Quotes and Wisdom about Leadership, Hope, Organizing and Narrative
• Inspiring quotes from women leaders and activists
• Quotes from Beyond the Gender Binary

Power

• Power and Power Mapping: Start Here
• It’s All About Power: A Guide to Thinking Differently about Power for Solidarity in Social Change
• All About Power: Understanding Social Power and Power Structures
• A Guide to Power Analysis in Community Organising
• Pillars of Power Analysis: Identify the Institutions
• The Little Book of Power