Eric Hoffer Quotes

Absolute power should never be trusted to man. It has perverted the wisest heads, and corrupted the best hearts in the world. I should be afraid to commit my property, liberty and life to a body of angels for one whole year.

Those who have no sense of right, reason or religion, have a natural propensity to make use of their strength to the destruction of such as are weaker than they.

Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I found that out when I was Attorney General in Massachusetts.

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who posses it; and this I know, my lords: that where law ends, tyranny begins.

To assume all the powers is not good for anybody. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All those experiments have a bad ending.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

Religion is never the problem; it's the people who use it to gain power.

Power corrupts; but absolute power is really neat.

The whole administrative, judicial, and legislative machinery obeys a single will, the caprice of General Porfirio Diaz, who during his long administration has shown that the principal motive that guides him is to maintain himself in power and at any cost.

... a consolidation of unchecked and despotic power in the House of Representatives ...

Power is always dangerous. It attracts the worst and corrupts the best..

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

Arbitrary power is the natural object of temptation to a prince, as wine and women to a young fellow, or a bribe to a judge, or avarice to old age.

No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding empirical evidence.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?

It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.

The State acquires power... and because of its insatiable lust for power it is incapable of giving up any of it. The State never abdicates.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do.

There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

I think that what went wrong with religion is the same thing that went wrong with politics. Is that it became too money based and too controlling. It's just a weakness that we human beings have for control - we want one thing and then we want more and then we want more.

Religion is just mind control.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.