Edgar Z. Friedenberg Quotes

Powerlessness corrupts: absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely

Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.

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

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

American government has seemed to mean naught but impotence and unavailing words.

You know, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"? It's the same with powerlessness. Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.

How little authority I have

If there's something I hate the most, it's feeling helpless, powerless.

I understand that people believe that they are impotent and can do very little.

Helplessness is a mighty power.

An honest private man often grows cruel and abandoned when converted into an absolute prince. Give a man power of doing what he pleases with impunity, you extinguish his fear, and consequently overturn in him one of the great pillars of morality.

Experience proves that those are oftenest abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity. Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest.

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

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.

Now as to the behavior of the soldiers: occupations always corrupt the occupiers.

How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!

Many of the greatest tyrants on the records of history have begun their reigns in the fairest manner. But the truth is, this unnatural power corrupts both the heart and the understanding.

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

Among other causes of misfortune which your not being armed brings upon you, it makes you despised.

Luxury, that alluring pest with fair forehead, which, yielding always to the will of the body, throws a deadening influence over the senses, and weakens the limbs more than the drugs of Circe's cup.

absolute liberty ... tends to corrupt absolutely.

But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.

His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.