Quotes about Power

You cannot bring a fresh, new word about human flourishing and expect the old, established systems of oppression and power to stand by passively. Or, as Jesus put it, "You can't put new wine into old wineskins.

When people charge in with great insistence that this is God's word all the while neglecting the very real humanity of these books, they can inadvertently rob these writings of their sacred power. All because of starting in the wrong place. You start with the human. You ask those questions, you enter there, you direct your energies to understanding why these people wrote these books. Because whatever divine you find in it, you find the divine through and in the human, not around it.

as the king rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king's belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it. (That's in the Bible. Word for word.)

God is in the best, and also the worst. God is in the presence, and also in the absence. God is in the power, and also in the powerlessness.

It is as if the smallest amount of light is infinitely more powerful than massive amounts of dark.

I read more of the prophets, these poets and sages who spoke all kinds of truth to power. Another of the ways they explained why they'd been taken into exile was because there was a widening gap between rich and poor in their society, and whenever that happens, the entire system is in danger of imploding. Again and again prophets like Amos announce that if more and more wealth ends up in fewer and fewer hands everybody will suffer. How had I missed this?

Which is stronger and more powerful, the hardness of the human heart or God's unrelenting, infinite, expansive love?

Your days in power are numbered because the deepest forces of the universe are on the side of the oppressed, the underdog, and the powerless

Jesus is said to be a priest in the order of Melchizedek, a priest of God Most High who is a priest not on the basis of a regulation as to his ancestry but on the basis of the power of an indestructible life.

what kept coming back to me was that one word gift. Receiving, and then passing it along. Opening up to power and force and energy way beyond me, letting it move through me.

I won't have it, in poetry, that bulk counts. People say to me, 'Now settle down and do a long work, since you have shown the public that you can produce beautiful short poetry.' And their implication tells me that making two verses or a short poem does not satisfy their concept of what an accomplished poet should be able to do. Bulk they want, as evidence of a man's power.

Spare me the setting of my fate to music.