Unbridled Power Quotes

Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.

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

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.

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.

Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.

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

The State acquires power... and because of its insatiable lust for power it is incapable of giving up any of it. The State never abdicates.

This administration seems intent on accumulating unchecked power.

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

There has been so much power concentrated. There is no leash on that power anymore and Americans face the situation that this power is getting momentum with each passing year with each presidency.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I found that out when I was Attorney General in Massachusetts.

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any kind of vice; it cannot be killed and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.

Monarchy is in itself irrational, evil government, unless over those who are naturally beasts and slaves.

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's to late.

Allowing staff to dictate frameworks and policy outcomes without appropriate checks by elected leaders has corrosive effects.

How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.

There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.

You know, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"? It's the same with powerlessness. Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.

I felt invincible. My strength was that of a giant. God was certainly standing by me. I smashed five saloons with rocks before I ever took a hatchet.

… autocrat of half the world

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

The truth is, I've been the Hulk my whole life.

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.