Powers

Famous quotes containing the word powers:

    ... when I exclaim against novels, I mean when contrasted with those works which exercise the understanding and regulate the imagination.—For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers ...
    Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)

    Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire,
    With your harmonious choir
    Encircle her I love and sing her into peace,
    That my old care may cease....
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.
    Han Suyin (b. 1917)