Top 100 Abuse Power Quotes
#1. It is human nature to abuse power, no matter who you are.
Naomi Wolf
#2. People who regularly abuse power don't like being laughed at'.
Pieter-Dirk Uys
#3. Capitaine Etienne Relais was known to be incorruptible in an ambience in which vice was the norm, honor for sale, and laws made to be broken, and men operated on the assumption that he who did not abuse power did not deserve to have it.
Isabel Allende
#4. Most people abuse power. They use power to dominate others. They use power to destroy others. Ultimately when you do this, you lose it.
Frederick Lenz
#5. If men like [Ken] Starr and his allies could ignore the Constitution and abuse power for ideological and malicious ends to topple a President, I feared for my country.
Hillary Clinton
#6. How do you overcome the negative karmas and problems and misery that occur to people who abuse power? You stop abusing power.
Frederick Lenz
#7. If you abuse power, you will be burned and then you will learn ... if you live.
Frederick Lenz
#8. Power breeds responsibilities, in international affairs as in domestic
or even private. To dodge or disclaim these responsibilities is one form of the abuse of power.
Irving Kristol
#9. Once again, President Clinton is using American troops to deflect attention from his record of lies, distortions, obstructions of justice and abuse of power.
Ron Paul
#11. You can use power for good or bad, for control or freedom. You grew up watching your dad abuse it one way and it made you take the opposite direction. That's what we all think. Everything's about balance. That's what sustains life. Maybe your role is to keep your dad in check?
Katie Kacvinsky
#12. With power comes the abuse of power. And where there are bosses, there are crazy bosses. It's nothing new.
Judd Rose
#13. Experience constantly proves that every man who has power is impelled to abuse it; he goes on till he is pulled up by some limits. Who would say it! virtue even has need of limits.
Baron De Montesquieu
#14. Sit peacefully in a church and think of church history: witchburning perhaps, or child abuse, genocide, the amassing of disgusting wealth, the repression of women, inquisitions, castrating child choir singers, the denial of Santa Claus and the support of fascists in power.
Kaz Cooke
#16. When a long abuse of power is corrected, it is generally replaced by an opposite violence. In the new dispensation all that was good in what went before is tarred indiscriminately with the bad.
John McGahern
#17. The American people do not begrudge anyone his or her power until they start abusing it.
Chris Bell
#18. If he were any other man, I might have suspected him of substance abuse, of being coked up or something. But Barrons was too much a purist for that; his drugs were money, power, and control
Karen Marie Moning
#19. This House cannot function without an open, accountable, and independent ethics process; and the molestation of that process by the majority is an abuse of power that cannot stand.
Louise Slaughter
#22. Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.
James Madison
#23. The democratic state can sometimes abuse its power as much as those who seek to destroy it abuse fundamental rights and democratic practices.
David Blunkett
#24. The threat to change Senate rules is a raw abuse of power and will destroy the very checks and balances our founding fathers put in place to prevent absolute power by any one branch of government,
Harry Reid
#25. Media is a big problem around the world, it's powerful and can abuse its power.
Julian Assange
#27. Democracy must be built through open societies that share information. When there is information, there is enlightenment. When there is debate, there are solutions. When there is no sharing of power, no rule of law, no accountability, there is abuse, corruption, subjugation and indignation.
Atifete Jahjaga
#29. It was a beautiful lie that they had all been telling themselves - that you could have magic without monsters.
Anne Ursu
#30. And journalism itself has changed. News organizations and some journalists have transformed from their traditional role as watchdogs of power into institutions of power themselves with an ability, indeed, a susceptibility, to abuse that power.
Joan Konner
#33. The right of self defense never ceases. It is among the most sacred, and alike necessary to nations and to individuals, and whether the attack be made by Spain herself or by those who abuse her power, its obligation is not the less strong.
James Monroe
#34. I'M CONFUSED, because I don't know why it's so hard to obey a policeman. You will not win!!! And I don't know why some policeman abuse their power. Power is a responsibility, not a weapon to brandish and lord over the populace.
Benjamin Watson
#35. I'm not sure why, but I seem to be drawn to stories about abuses of power. But I'm also drawn, not so much to victims' stories, as stories that tend to show how power works. Because if you don't understand the criminals, you can't figure out how to stop the crimes.
Alex Gibney
#36. The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.
James Richardson
#37. Loving money at the expense of others is an abuse of power to get wealth.
Myles Munroe
#38. Abuses of the freedom of speech ought to be repressed, but to whom are we to commit the power of doing it?
Benjamin Franklin
#39. Bill Clinton was impeached primarily for criminal conduct: lying under oath and misleading a federal grand jury about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Nixon would have been impeached for a wide array of criminal acts, as well as abuses of power.
Jonathan Turley
#42. Abuse of power isn't limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we're not vigilant.
Clint Eastwood
#43. He can switch from one view to another with frightening ease. I think it is a sign of being accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter because you cannot be contradicted.
Anna Funder
#44. Someone who really wants to discover themselves has to be particularly careful about the use and abuse of power. But even your average human being just passing through another life has to be careful.
Frederick Lenz
#45. Richard Nixon as a 12-year-old was given a portrait of Lincoln that he hung over his bed. Nixon also justified what would later be seen as abuses of power by comparing America in the Vietnam era to the country during the Civil War.
Richard Norton Smith
#46. I know you're competent and your thesis advisor knows you're competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you're doing?"
This was said to a young woman who had already spent five years and over $10,000 getting to that point in her Ph.D. program.
Joanna Russ
#47. Every American, regardless of their background, has the right to live free of unwarranted government intrusion. Repealing the worst provisions of the Patriot Act will reign in this gross abuse of power and restore to everyone our basic Constitutional rights.
Pete Stark
#49. The abuse of political power is not as important as the loss of lives. Plus there is a process for curing the abuse of institutions.
Babatunde Fashola
#50. The true patriot is motivated by a sense of responsibility and out of self interest for himself, his family, and the future of his country to resist government abuse of power. He rejects the notion that patriotism means obedience to the state.
Ron Paul
#51. The best guarantee against the abuse of power consists in the freedom, the purity, and the frequency of popular elections.
John Quincy Adams
#52. There is comfort in knowing that you don't have to pretend anymore, that you are going to do everything within your power to heal.
Ellen Bass
#53. As government grows, its increased power to grant favors or inflict pain attracts more people who would abuse the system.
John Fund
#54. We are under God's power, and we can do nothing but by the power of God, and woe shall hereafter be to us if we abuse this power.
John Wycliffe
#55. The challenge of power is how to use it and not abuse it. When you abuse it, it reverses on you and it hurts you.
Frederick Lenz
#56. This ain't my first rodeo!".
~R. Alan Woods [1999]
R. Alan Woods
#57. The greater the power, the more need there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have power, we mustn't reduce their power even more by making them yet more transparent.
Julian Assange
#58. The lesson for me was clear: national security officials do not like the light. They act abusively and thuggishly only when they believe they are safe, in the dark. Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only real antidote.
Glenn Greenwald
#59. Persecution has not crushed it, power has not beaten it back, time has not abated its force, and, what is most wonderful of all, the abuses and treasons of its friends have not shaken its stability.
Horace Bushnell
#60. Our Constitution, which was intended to limit government power and abuse, has failed,
Ron Paul
#61. If one abuses or neglects internal powers, external forces will act accordingly.
T.F. Hodge
#62. We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#64. All you care about is the control and power you have over me and I hate myself for giving that to you!
Lydia Kelly
#65. If knowledge is power, let's spread it as widely as possible and dilute it to deny those who would abuse it.
Stuart Aken
#66. 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.
Jonathan Swift
#67. Shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of my mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom, with power, because I have been followed with one cry of abuse ever since for not being a Government tool?
William Hazlitt
#68. After many unhappy experiments in the direction of an ideal Republic, it was found that what may be described as a Despotism tempered by Dynamite provides, on the whole, the most satisfactory description of ruler - an autocrat who dares not abuse his autocratic power.
W.S. Gilbert
#69. Human rights violations are nit accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm.
Paul Farmer
#70. It is a sad truth that those who crave and seek power, invariably abuse that power once they obtain it.
Ian Gregoire
#71. The Internet is an empowering force for people who are protesting against the abuse of power.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#72. The abuse of power that seems to create the most unhappiness is when a person uses personal power to get ahead without regards to the welfare of others, or when power is used to go into the lower dimensional planes.
Frederick Lenz
#73. The presumed causes of Americas troubles can be summed up simply: the evils of unlimited competition, and abuses by those with economic power.
Charles A. Reich
#74. The potential for the abuse of power through digital networks - upon which we the people now depend for nearly everything, including our politics - is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#75. I'm of that generation of Jews still deeply influenced by the Holocaust. Certainly the notion that the state power to kill can be subject to such extraordinary abuse is always lurking beneath the surface for me. Certainly my experience and identity as a Jew is there.
Scott Turow
#76. To be evil at all, Satan needs good things he can abuse, things like intelligence, power and will. Those good things come from God.
J. Budziszewski
#77. Now the sole remedy for the abuse of political power is to limit it; but when politics corrupt business, modern reformers invariably demand the enlargement of the political power.
Isabel Paterson
#78. Men should do their actual living and working in communities small enough to permit of genuine self-government and the assumption of personal responsibilities, federated into larger units in such a way that the temptation to abuse great power should not arise.
Mahatma Gandhi
#79. Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity; in woman, fantasy.
Honore De Balzac
#80. It's not just the abuse of power that's the problem. It's the power to abuse.
Stefan Molyneux
#81. Anyone entrusted with power will abuse it if not also animated with the love of truth and virtue, no matter whether he be a prince, or one of the people.
Jean De La Fontaine
#82. My nature is that when I see abuses of power, I want to expose those abuses.
Glenn Greenwald
#83. It is an abuse of power, when you are President of the United States, to use the White House to single out a single news organization, and castigate them and try to delegitimize them.
Monica Crowley
#84. That anyone who possesses power has a tendency to abuse it is an eternal truth. They tend to go as far as the barriers will allow.
Baron De Montesquieu
#85. Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.
Madeleine L'Engle
#86. It is regarded as axiomatic that parents have more power then children. This is an inescapable biological fact; young children are completely dependent on their parents or other caring adults for survival.
Judith Lewis Herman
#87. If you can abuse your power you have too much.
Marty Rubin
#88. We can decrease abuse and murder when we get that for both sexes, abuse does not derive from power, but powerlessness.
Warren Farrell
#89. You see, it has been my experience that no matter where you go, you will find some who abuse their power.
Brandon Sanderson
#90. I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally.
Glenn Greenwald
#91. The world isn't fair? What a huge revelation! Some people in power abuse those they have power over? Amazing! When did this start happening?
Brandon Sanderson
#92. It's amazing how much power each of us has when it comes to how we make other people feel about themselves. Whether we realize it or not, we have the ability to affect and shape people, for better or for worse. I hope I never abuse my power.
Krista Doyle
#93. I write about power, that's my real subject - how you get it, what you do with it, how you abuse it. I'm equally wary of liberals and conservatives.
Rene Balcer
#94. It is this dependency that became, and is, the breeding ground for abuses of power.
Bell Hooks
#95. Surveillance of power is one of the most important ways to ensure that power does not abuse its status. But, of course, power does not like to be watched.
Bruce Schneier
#96. When the locus of evaluation is seen as residing in the expert, it would appear that the long-range social implications are in the direction of the social control of the many by the few.
Carl R. Rogers
#97. Dictators can fix up their entire families in good jobs, in or around government, and often do. In democracies, such a practice is frowned upon. Privileged access to the corridors of power through family connections and a kind of old boys' network, is also deemed an abuse of power, and so it is.
Jimmy Reid
#99. Information is power. Disinformation is abuse of power.
Newton Lee
#100. Mysticism is the study of power, its use, and its abuse. At every moment you are getting stronger or you are growing weaker. At every moment your attention field is increasing or decreasing.
Frederick Lenz
