Joseph Addison Quotes

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.

There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.

If you teach your boy that it is right to buy a vote, it is an easy step for him to learn to use money to bribe or corrupt officials or trustees of any class. If you teach your boy that it is right to steal votes, it is an easy step for him to believe that it is right to steal whatever he may need or greatly desire. The results of such an influence will enter every branch of society, it will reach your bank cashiers, and affect positions of trust in every department; it will ultimately enter your courts, and affect the administrations of justice.

The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances... [Slavery]

It is not crazy to think that powerful people do some pretty horrible things. And maybe they get out of hand. Maybe it just gets away from them. It snowballs.

Nothing's as dangerous as power with impunity.

Think'st thou there is no tyranny but that Of blood and chains? The despotism of vice-- The weakness and the wickedness of luxury-- The negligence--the apathy--the evils Of sensual sloth--produces ten thousand tyrants, Whose delegated cruelty surpasses The worst acts of one energetic master, However harsh and hard in his own bearing.

All weakness tends to corrupt, and impotence corrupts absolutely.

Callous greed grows pious very fast.

When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to [profess] things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Selfishness is the root of great evil.

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

This is the sin against the Holy Ghost: - To speak of bloody power as right divine, And call on God to guard each vile chief's house, And for such chiefs, turn men to wolves and swine.

Even a little untruth destroys a man, as a drop of poison ruins milk.

Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotsman to draw the trigger at his death.

When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands to be believed.

Lying is a most disgraceful vice; it first despises God, and then fears men.

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.

There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterably dishonest that theft is to them a master passion.

When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed

Unlimited power is worse for the average person than unlimited alcohol; and the resulting intoxication is more damaging for others. Very few have not deteriorated when given absolute dominion. It is worse for the governor than for the governed.

Evil is dull, that is the worst of it.

The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.