Abigail Adams Quotes
I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature, and that power whether vested in many or few is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, 'Give, give.'
Abigail Adams, 1744-1818, Writer and First Lady (John Adams) Letter to John Adams, 1775
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Head of the Sikh Religion
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.
Perhaps the most famous quotation in all of Political Science is this one. What is fascinating is that 74 years earlier, Shelly, the most famous of the English Poets expressed the same idea in one of his great poems. See {627920}. The last sentence of this quote is often excluded.
This is a variation of the famous Lord Acton quotation: {292904}.
Abigail Adams was the wife and closest advisor of John Adams, as well as the mother of John Quincy Adams. She is sometimes considered to have been a Founder of the United States, and is now designated as the first Second Lady and second First Lady of the United States, although these titles were not used at the time. She and Barbara Bush are the only two women to be married to one U.S. president and the mother of another.
