Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

You can't trust anybody with power.

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

Since the origin of the world there has never been a king—even if you were to select the very best—who did not in some measure abuse his authority…

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

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who posses it; and this I know, my lords: that where law ends, tyranny begins.

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

I believe the root of all evil is abuse of power.

What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.

Brutal men with unlimited power are the same all over the world.

Power intoxicates men. It is never voluntarily surrendered. It must be taken from them.

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.'

Suspect power more than vice.

Power corrupts; but absolute power is really neat.

Power tends to corrupt if you're there too long.

Tyranny, Is far the worst of treasons. Dost thou deem None rebels except subjects? The prince who Neglects or violates his trust is more A brigand than the robber-chief.

Any political or philosophical agenda can and will be perverted by power and/or fear.

The attraction of power is heady, addictive. And as we know from real life, it can be a disease. A horrific disease.

What worries me most about Trump, other than all of the other crazy things, is that I believe that he wants power and I believe from my point of view that power corrupts, and that the whole purpose of our founding fathers and America was to contain power.

The shortest way to change a radical into a conservative, a liberal into a tyrant, a man into a beast, is to give him power over his fellows.