Michel de Montaigne Quotes

Power is always a corrupting influence.

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.

...And in freedom, most people find sin.

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

I truly believe that all power corrupts. Such is probably the thinking behind every political film ever made in Hollywood.

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.

Power has long been regarded as morally corrosive, and we often suspect the intentions of those who seek it.

There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.

Too much liberty corrupts us all.

If you really think that ambition, power, lust, desire are not as applicable in the media as in politics or on Wall Street or anywhere else, you're deluding yourself.

Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.

The great corrupter of public man is the ego.

Nine tenths of the callers at the White House want something they ought not to have.

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

Men are corrupt and will be so … laws must be invented to check and balance the original and ineradicable perversion of human nature.

In the general course of human nature, A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will.

Gold--the picklock that never fails.

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.

Absolute welfare corrupts absolutely.

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money.

Every man who is worth thirty millions and is not wedded to them, is dangerous to the government.

Everything in Rome has its price.

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

Two passions have powerful influence on the affairs of men: the love of power and the love of money.

Money wants no followers.