Frank Herbert Quotes

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

Power corrupts; but absolute power is really neat.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations perverted it into tyranny.

The shortest way to change a radical into a conservative, a liberal into a tyrant, a man into a beast, is to give him power over his fellows.

Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.

With people in high office, the old - you go into the extreme, which is absolute power and absolute power corrupts.

Government has within it a tendency to abuse its powers.

Power in the hands of the reformer is no less potentially corrupting than in the hands of the oppressor.

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race

Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.

Politicians as a class are dangerous, that people who are seeking power over us are not, by definition, our friends.

You can't trust anybody with power.

A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

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

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

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.

The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.

There is an interesting interplay between power corrupting and corruption empowering. The causality does not go one way.