Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes

Power is supposed to be so corrupt. I don't think it's so much corrupt, in the usual sense of the word, as stupid and unrealistic. The more power a person has, the further he gets from reality.

Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality ... and fall.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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

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.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

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

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

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

A general presumption that Icings will govern well, is not a sufficient security to the People... those who subjected themselves to the will of a man were governed by a beast.

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

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.

History is replete with examples of what happens when any group of authorities do not have to answer to empirical evidence but are free to define truth as they see fit. None of the examples has a happy ending.

Nothing's as dangerous as power with impunity.

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

Tyranny knows no restraint of appetite.

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

Many of the greatest tyrants on the records of history have begun their reigns in the fairest manner. But the truth is, this unnatural power corrupts both the heart and the understanding.

Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.

Arbitrary power is the natural object of temptation to a prince, as wine and women to a young fellow, or a bribe to a judge, or avarice to old age.

Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual. Reality always creeps in--the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.

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.

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

Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.