Mark Steyn Quotes

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

At length corruption, like a general flood (So long by watchful ministers withstood), Shall deluge all; and avarice, creeping on, Spread like a low-born mist, and blot the sun.

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.

Corruption, the greatest single bane of our society today.

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

Corruption exists everywhere.

Power is always a corrupting influence.

Too much liberty corrupts us all.

The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.

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.

Two evils, greed and faction are the destruction of all justice.

Were the life of man prolonged, he would become such a proficient in villainy, that it would become necessary again to drown or to burn the world. Earth would become an hell; for future rewards when put off to a great distance, would cease to encourage, and future punishments to alarm.

There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.

For there is no air that men so greedily draw in, that diffuses itself so soon, and that penetrates so deep as that of license.

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.

But in the present day men cast off gentleness, and are all for being bold; they spurn frugality, and retain only extravagance; they discard humility, and aim only at being first. Therefore they shall surely perish.

Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.

It is awful hard to get people interested in corruption unless they can get some of it.

Selfishness is the root of great evil.

People make filthy things with the freedom they regained.

As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.

A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity.

The fact is that my native land is a prey to barbarism, that in it men's only God is their belly, that they live only for the present, and that the richer a man is the holier he is held to be.

The greater the wealth the thicker will be the dirt.