Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.

Exercising power can do strange things to people. You can become convinced that you're irreplaceable. You can become convinced that you're always right. And I think the danger is the longer you stay in power, the more likely that is to happen.

Power always sincerely, conscientiously, de très bon foi, believes itself right. Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak.

Power, like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation.

You can't trust anybody with power.

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

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

As God as my witness, they said, We're above the law. There's nothing you can do to us. You're just a church secretary.

Most people who get into power in the western world start with great intentions, but slowly they all become entrapped and hung by their own petard.

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

The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.

The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.

Every one, more or less, loves Power, yet those who most wish for it are seldom the fittest to be trusted with it.

The story being told in 'Star Wars' is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you're in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they're actually not.

One thing I hope I'll never be is drunk with my own power. And anybody who says I am will never work in this town again.

Power has long been regarded as morally corrosive, and we often suspect the intentions of those who seek it.

But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.

Those who administer or possess governing power, always try to surround their high-handed actions with a cloak of legality, and to persuade the people that they act from good motives; this they are easily able to effect when they are the sole interpreters of the law;

He who is the most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power is as eager after for the prerogatives of government.

Suspect power more than vice.

Rulers who prefer popular opinion to truth have as much power as robbers in the desert.

Although it seems that religion and politics should be completely opposed and contradict each other in their principles and their maxims, they nevertheless get on very well, …they defend and support each other. Religion backs up the government, terrible though it may be; conversely, the government backs up religion, dumb and vain though it may be…. the priests … strongly recommend to everyone to obey magistrates, princes and sovereigns, as established by God to rule the others, under pain of curse and eternal damnation; …princes have their people pay respect to priests, and give those priests good salaries and revenues, and maintain them in the vain and abusive office of their fake ministry. They compel the people to regard as sacred and holy everything those ministers do … There again, this is the way abuses, errors, superstition, delusion and deceit have established themselves in the world, and how they remain in spite of all the misfortunes that they cause to the poor peoples…

Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence