Lord Acton Quotes

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

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

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

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

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

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.

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.

To assume all the powers is not good for anybody. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All those experiments have a bad ending.

You can't be a dictator any more; anyone who tries to play the part of God will stumble.

The army and the government needs a dictator.

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.

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.

Mobutu does not think he is God.

When any one person or body of men seize into their hands the power in the last resort, there is properly no longer a government, but what Aristotle and his followers call the abuse and corruption of one.

The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

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.

Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.

Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

Enlightened despots are mythical creatures; real despots seem more interested in stealing money or installing their sons after them.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.