Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality.
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.
Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?
Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
Anarchy is the stepping stone to absolute power.
Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians.
No country can be called free which is governed by an absolute power; and it matters not whether it be an absolute royal power or an absolute legislative power, as the consequences will be the same to the people.
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power...power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men.
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.
Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.
Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.
Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.
Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.
The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.
Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.
No human being, man, woman, or child, may safely be entrusted to the power of another; for no human being may safely be trusted with absolute power.
Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
God cannot approve of a system of servitude, in which the master is guilty of assuming absolute power - of assuming God's place and relation towards his fellow-men.
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern.
Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.
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