Arthur Koestler Quotes

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

Power corrupts; but absolute power is really neat.

Jayalalithaa was brutalised from the age of 16 in the cinema world. She therefore bears a psychotic pleasure in humiliating people as she was humiliated. She was deadened to normal human emotions.

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.

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

I was the kind of person who got bullied and loved the attention of it.

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.

Power is always a corrupting influence.

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 tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.

Power always thinks... that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.

Too much liberty corrupts us all.

A bully is playing a game, one that he or she enjoys and needs. You're welcome to play this game if it makes you happy, but for most people, it will make you miserable.

... all of our human experience shows that no one with absolute power can be trusted to give it up even in part.

The torture situation is an external conflict, a contest between the subject and his tormentor … drive him [the subject] deeper and deeper into himself until he is no longer able to control his responses in an adult fashion.

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.

No matter how healthy a man's morals may be when he enters the White House, he comes out again with a pock-marked soul.

Those who have no sense of right, reason or religion, have a natural propensity to make use of their strength to the destruction of such as are weaker than they.

Power is always dangerous. It attracts the worst and corrupts the best..

Viewing Israelis and Palestinians from a psychological perspective, they would both be seen as victims of abuse; that is how they both understandably feel, and it's how they both understandably behave. The Jewish psyche is in victimized reaction to the Holocaust, and the Palestinian psyche is in victimized reaction to the Israelis.

'Stop playing the victim.' - unless you've been cast in a community theater production of 'Law & Order: SVU,' I'm not sure why anyone would choose to play victim.

When the state machinery defends criminals and the public prosecutors collude with the accused in certain cases and the victims are members of a particular community, then 'Justice to all' is empty rhetoric.