Anthony Eden Quotes

If he be not impeachable whilst in office, he will spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself reelected.

The whole administrative, judicial, and legislative machinery obeys a single will, the caprice of General Porfirio Diaz, who during his long administration has shown that the principal motive that guides him is to maintain himself in power and at any cost.

What happens when you get any kind of entrenched power is that it just becomes kind of corrupt and self-serving.

Politicians remain in power although they violate the rules.

Unfortunately, some of the African leaders employ various nefarious means to remain in office far beyond what their constitutions permit.

With people in high office, the old - you go into the extreme, which is absolute power and absolute power corrupts.

Government has within it a tendency to abuse its powers.

Power not only corrupts he who wields the power but those who submit to it. Those who grovel at the feet of power betray their fellows to hide themselves behind the cloak of submission. It is an evil thing.

Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Men are still men. The despot's wickedness Comes of ill teaching, and of power's excess,-- Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs.

They kill people here who stand up for their rights The system's just too damned corrupt It's always the same, the name of the game Is who do you know higher up

There are, perhaps, few men who can for any length of time enjoy office and power without being more or less under the influence of feelings unfavorable to the faithful discharge of their political duties.

That anyone who possesses power has a tendency to abuse it is an eternal truth. They tend to go as far as the barriers will allow.

The sin of all time has been the exercise of assumed powers. This is the essence of tyranny.

In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes.

Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.

Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power.

But now well democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses têtes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power, they are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people. They talk about cutting off the heads of the grosses têtes but now we know that there will be other grosses têtes and the will be all the same.

The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.

A tyrant is the worst disease, and the cause of all others.

Abuse of power comes as no surprise

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.

To be governed is, under pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest, to be laid under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, exhausted, hoaxed and robbed; then, upon the slightest resistance, at the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, annoyed, hunted down, pulled about, beaten, disarmed, bound, imprisoned, shot, judged, condemned, banished, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and, to crown all, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.