My dad is still Christian Scientist. My mom’s not, and I’m not. But I believe in God, and that there’s a higher power and an intelligence that’s bigger than us and that we can rely on. It’s not just us, thinking we are the ones in control of everything. That idea gives me support.
Complete strangers can stand silent next to each other in an elevator and not even look each other in the eye. But at a concert, those same strangers could find themselves dancing and singing together like best friends. That’s the power of music.
People assume that the executive branch has more power than it actually has. Only the legislative branch can create the laws; the executive branch cannot create the laws. So, if the executive branch tries to create a branch one side or the other… you go back to the founders of the nation. They set up a system that ensures that it doesn’t happen.
Bitcoin is both disruptive from a technology perspective, but there’s a tremendous power of social good behind it. So you can both build a cool business or have a great investment return, and there’s the promise of potentially improving the remittance industry or banking the unbanked.
I want to do everything in my power to ensure the equality between all movements of Judaism in the state of Israel: Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. In conversions, in budgets, in the eyes of the law. No one can claim ownership over the Jewish God.
I feel there’s a power in theatre, but it’s an indirect power. It’s like the relationship of the sleeper to the unconscious. You discover things you can’t afford to countenance in waking life. You can forget them, remember them a day later or not have any idea what they are about.
Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.
For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity.
One of the sad things about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little. The world now is almost inured to the power of journalism. The best journalism would manage to outrage people. And people are less and less inclined to outrage.
Bushmaster was such a great adversary, and Mustafa Shakir, just the way that he embodies him in terms of the power of the voice, the stillness, and then, at the same time, when they do get after it, when he does fight, just how kinetic he was. He just brought a great dynamic and being able to explore his history in making the character Jamaican.
According to Jewish legend, only the very wisest and very holiest rabbis had the power to make golems, animated servants of clay. Strictly speaking, the golem is not in the same class with Frankenstein’s monster, because the golem is neither alive nor dead. He is, rather, the ancestor of all robots.
For millennia, men have enslaved women and attempted to appropriate female creative power, re-casting themselves as gods and creators. This assault continues today in the forms of ruthless wealth and mineral extraction, genetic engineering, mass surveillance, and war mongering.
My parents made it clear that I should never display even the slightest disrespect to individuals who had the power to let me skip a half grade or move into more challenging classes. While it was all right for me to know more about a topic than my sixth-grade teacher had ever learned, questioning her facts could only lead to trouble.
Profitability, growth, and safeguards against existential risks are crucial to strengthening a company’s long-term prospects. But if these three factors constitute a company’s ‘hard power,’ firms also need ‘soft power’: public trust and acceptance, won by fulfilling a company’s social responsibility.
The sea does not belong to despots. Upon its surface men can still exercise unjust laws, fight, tear one another to pieces, and be carried away with terrestrial horrors. But at thirty feet below its level, their reign ceases, their influence is quenched, and their power disappears.
I think that if you don’t do the full analysis of what the origin of the electrical power is, where it comes from, how you get batteries into these cars, what the cost is in terms of CO2 and the environment, I think the analysis that we are going to save the planet with electric cars is nonsense.
‘I Won’ is not a love song. It’s just me uplifting women in general. I’m giving women the power to treat themselves as a trophy – to show that and know it in yourself and be confident – because when they do that, whoever they’re with is winning.
Jupiter is so big and its gravitational pull so strong that man would find it difficult to move about on the surface. The answer is to whittle it down to proper size with terrajets and nuclear power, using the debris to increase the size of Jupiter’s moons so they, too, can be colonized.
Each time you choose not to act on a frightened part of your personality, you create authentic power – and you grow spiritually. The frightened parts of your personality come less frequently and with less intensity, and the loving parts fill more and more of your consciousness.
However much in the foreground depression feels, you are separate to it. This is going to sound cheesy, but I’d say you are the sky. A cloud comes and dominates the sky. But the sky is still the sky. Depression tells you everything is going to get worse, but that’s a symptom. Don’t give depression power – constantly discredit it.
Through our Building Bridges dialogues at Accenture, where we have brought together people from diverse backgrounds to have sometimes difficult conversations, such as around race, I have experienced the power of storytelling to help people from diverse backgrounds understand each other.
Bob Gates has unusual standing in the debate about the Obama administration’s foreign policy: He was defense secretary for both a hawkish President George W. Bush and a wary President Obama. He understood Bush’s desire to project power and Obama’s skepticism.
India’s infrastructure is pathetic, with frequent electric power breakdowns even in metropolitan cities, dangerously unhealthy water supply in urban areas, a galloping rate of HIV infection, and gaping potholes that dot our national highways.
We are becoming able to see the pursuit of external power for what it is and the futility of trying to escape the pain of powerlessness by changing the world. When we look inward, not outward, we can dismantle the parts of our personalities that have controlled us for so long – such as anger, jealousy, vindictiveness, superiority, inferiority.
