Diana Gabaldon Quotes

It's very hard to operate on a general philosophy of power. They say that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but I don't agree with that. I think you have to be corrupted to be corrupted by power.

Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.

People will not follow a leader with moral incongruities for long. Every time you compromise character you compromise leadership. The foundation of firm leadership is character.

Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.

When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist because you've crushed anyone's desire to do the right thing with all these incentives.

I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death.

I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.

A man is not good or bad for one action.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises?

We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning.

If you had better sense you’d have learned by now that nothing thrives so well as wickedness

But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the latter constitutes a far greater danger to human survival.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

Daja doesn't exactly need to be tested on whether she's honorable or not." "Doesn't she? Don't all of you? This is your first taste of the things which may come from your being powerful mages. People will offer you gold, status, even love. I want to know how you will react. If want to know if your teachers will release greedy, thoughtless monsters into the world.

One cannot hold power and not use it.

It is easy to be just when our own inclinations do not oppose it.

She said, 'Believe it or not, I used to be idealistic.' I asked her what 'idealistic' meant. 'It means you live by what you think is right.' 'You don't do that anymore?' 'There are questions I don't ask anymore.

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.

There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility.

There is no surer road to destruction than prosperity without character.

To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.

When we lack integrity, we use power to control. When we lead with integrity, we use power to bless.

We talk so much about one's rights... so little about what is actually right.

Broken people misuse their power while people who have values don't use their powers in a way that harms.