Lord Acton Quotes

The longer a politician bears power, the more he is controlled by that power.

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

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.

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…

Power is what men seek, and any group that gets it will abuse it. It is the same story.

With people in high office, the old - you go into the extreme, which is absolute power and absolute power corrupts.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. ~ Every class is unfit to govern ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

Politicians - power itself - are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.

You can't trust anybody with power.

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

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.

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

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

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

Every man who has been in office a few years believes he has a life estate in it.

Power corrupts; but absolute power is really neat.

My three years in politics was very instructive about the way in which the appetite for political power can destroy a human mind, destroy principles and values, and transform people into little monsters.

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.

The problem with Russia is not corruption per se, or even Putin per se. Russian government is not corrupt because Vladimir Putin has absolute power. Russian government has been corrupt and will always be as long as anyone has absolute power.

The more power you have, the more surely it will be taken from you before you are ready to give it up.

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.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.

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.

I am Congress; I'm president.