Your motivations--get that promotion, throw the best parties, run for public office--aren't impersonal abstractions but powerfully reflect who you are and what you focus on. An individual's goals figure prominently in the theories of personality first developed by the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. According to his successor David McClelland, what Friedrich Nietzsche called 'the will to power,' which he considered the major driving force behind human behavior, is one of the three basic motivations, along with achievement and affiliation, that differentiate us as individuals.A simple experiment show show these broad emotional motivations can affect what you pay attention to or ignore on very basic levels. When they examine images of faces that express different kinds of emotion, power-oriented subjects are drawn to nonconfrontational visages, such as 'surprise faces,' rather than to those that suggest dominance, as 'anger faces' do. In contrast, people spurred by affiliation gravitate toward friendly or joyful faces.

It would be both foolish and cumbersome to continue our everyday existences in bliss without first denying to ourselves, for the sake of excusing our own repugnance, the inherent cruelty from which modern civilization was conceived...And there can be no other path by which a fiercely competitive, yet social species, as humanity, can afford its members the level of safety, prosperity and stability—such that we enjoy now— without its initial pangs of cannibalism, brutality, dominance and cruelty to forge the foundations, very much like the lava which formed the ground upon which we now stand. Lava still erupts from the core. Brutality, Dominance, and Cruelty similarly erupt from ours; and they are no less prevalent now than in early human history.

I needed to channel the darkness that ran through my veins and embrace it. To play this game better than this man ever could have predicted. After all, I’d only been with him twice, and already I could see his weakness. His weakness was me.

No matter how tiny you look, you can lead huge men if you have what the huge men don't have.

The last five years had been a series of carefully orchestrated events. Every move, every strategy had been poured over in painstaking detail before it was set into motion. Pieces on a chess board. A collision of fate and circumstance. I’d planned for every hitch. Every contingency. Except the one that blindsided me like a vat of acid to the face. I fell in love with her.

His heart is the rhythm, mine is the echo.

I find few more satisfying exhibitions of power and control than deliberately creating desire - only to capriciously deny it...

I’m not letting you go, baby girl. You need to accept that.

It wasn’t desire, it was biology. My body was adapting to the situation. Doing what it needed to survive. That, I was certain of. Because if I had liked it, liked the hands of this monster, that would have made me a monster too.

Wo-man: A male mind driving a female body!