Bob Herbert Quotes

This nuclear option is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power.

A vile and overbearing temper becomes sometimes, in one long accustomed to the exercise of power, unendurable to those who are subject to its humors.

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it.

The Arrogance of Power

Those who exercise power always arrange matters so as to give their tyranny the appearance of justice.

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

A man in power, once becoming obnoxious, his acts, good or bad, will work out his ruin.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

I hope I'll never be is drunk with my own power.

The scum of the People are most Tyrannical when they get the Power, and treat their Betters with the greatest Insolence.

The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority.

We did not find it difficult to deal with Bush and his administration, because it is similar to regimes in our countries - both types include many who are full of arrogance and greed.

Power is poison. Its effects on Presidents had always been tragic; chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bar the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion.

Men in authority tend to abuse it – not all men, but many.

If you give human beings power over others, their natural tendency is to be fascists.

The world will go on much as it did before; and be always quite bad enough to allow bribery and corruption, jobbery and nepotism, quackery and arrogance, their full influence over our home and foreign policy.

Resist the temptation to exploit power for personal or group interests.

The possession of power does not necessarily imply its unrighteous or oppressive use, although it generally awakes suspicion.

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

Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel!

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum.

Gingrich’s violation of House rules was not an inadvertent error. It was a systematic pattern of deception, carried out with hubris and defiance over several years.

People who are in a position of power like to throw their weight around, and that becomes abuse.

People who exploit their power and abuse others need to be revealed.