Top 100 Quotes About Abuse Of Power
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. With power comes the abuse of power. And where there are bosses, there are crazy bosses. It's nothing new.
Judd Rose
#4. 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
#5. 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
#7. 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
#9. The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.
James Richardson
#10. Loving money at the expense of others is an abuse of power to get wealth.
Myles Munroe
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. The best guarantee against the abuse of power consists in the freedom, the purity, and the frequency of popular elections.
John Quincy Adams
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. The Internet is an empowering force for people who are protesting against the abuse of power.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. It's not just the abuse of power that's the problem. It's the power to abuse.
Stefan Molyneux
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Information is power. Disinformation is abuse of power.
Newton Lee
#27. What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.
Isabel Allende
#28. History is the study of the abuse of power.
Marty Rubin
#29. I think of my films as not necessarily political but more moral. Between my father, my stepfather, and my mother - they all felt pretty passionately about the importance of standing up and doing the right thing, and none of them were suck-ups. What motivates me is usually abuse of power.
Alex Gibney
#31. The government is so out of control. It is so bloated and infested with fraud and deceit and corruption and abuse of power.
Ted Nugent
#32. I don't like institutions that are beyond normal parliamentary scrutiny. It's an invitation to abuse of power, no matter how noble the intentions.
Stieg Larsson
#33. By ensuring that no one in government has too much power, the Constitution helps protect ordinary Americans every day against abuse of power by those in authority.
John Roberts
#34. In my case, I got hit a lot by bullies when I was a child, and so I naturally bristle against anybody who abuses power. And that seems to make me rather persistent when it comes to exposing the abuse of power.
Nick Davies
#35. The problem isn't the abuse of power; it's the power to abuse.
Mike Cloud
#36. Beware the abuse of Power. Both by those we disagree with, as well as those we may agree with
Ben Carson
#37. But many, perhaps most siblings share a private universe tropical with benevolence, betrayal, vendetta, reconciliation, and the use and abuse of power of which their parents know practically nothing.
Lauren Oliver
#38. The abuse of power manifests with phony spiritual teachers and phony gurus who tell you how to run your life and what to wear and what to eat, all that sort of stuff. They abuse. People don't realize that, listen to them and ruin their lives.
Frederick Lenz
#39. The president's attempted diktat takes money from bondholders and gives it a labor union that delivers money and votes for him ... Shaking down lenders for the benefit of political donors is recycled corruption and the abuse of power.
Cliff Asness
#40. The lust of dominion innovates so imperceptibly that we become complete despots before our wanton abuse of power is perceived; the tyranny first exercised in the nursery is exhibited in various shapes and degrees in every stage of our existence.
Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann
#41. These last few years we've seen an unacceptable abuse of power, having a president whose priority is expanding his own power.
Trey Gowdy
#42. It's funny, because there are so many stereotypes out there about actors and movie stars in general, but I've had a great opportunity to meet a lot of them, and maybe it's just because they don't behave that way around me, but I rarely see that kind of abuse of power.
Ryan Reynolds
#43. The abuse of power, Benton says. It all comes back to that. We want to be like God. If we can't create, we'll destroy, and once we've done it, once is not enough.
Patricia Cornwell
#44. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.
Thomas Pynchon
#45. I want to tell the world of cycling to please join me in telling Pat McQuaid to resign. I have never seen such an abuse of power in cycling's history - resign, Pat, if you love cycling. Resign even if you hate the sport.
Greg LeMond
#46. In speaking powerfully and eloquently for mercy and reconciliation to people divided by old hatreds and persecuted by abuse of power, the Holy Father was a beacon of light not just for Catholics, but for all people.
William J. Clinton
#47. It's an intolerable abuse of power to have employees who are supposed to be advancing the public interest actually working on political campaigns.
Sal Albanese
#49. great men are urged on to the abuse of power (when they need urging, which is not often), by their flatterers and dependents,
Charles Dickens
#50. The highest mode of corruption is the abuse of power.
Auliq Ice
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#56. Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.
James Madison
#58. 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
#59. It was a beautiful lie that they had all been telling themselves - that you could have magic without monsters.
Anne Ursu
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Abuses of the freedom of speech ought to be repressed, but to whom are we to commit the power of doing it?
Benjamin Franklin
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. This ain't my first rodeo!".
~R. Alan Woods [1999]
R. Alan Woods
#72. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. My nature is that when I see abuses of power, I want to expose those abuses.
Glenn Greenwald
#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'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
#87. 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
#88. It is this dependency that became, and is, the breeding ground for abuses of power.
Bell Hooks
#89. 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
#90. 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
#92. 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
#93. If you can't let go of the power you possess, if you can't surrender it gracefully when it is time to do so, you will most likely abuse it.
Donald Cozzens
#94. An absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life: the abuses of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy.
Terry Southern
#95. However vile the abuse they receive, media people must remember this is part of the price of getting a public voice. Stay grateful. Don't kick down, kick up. Criticise power rather than proles.
Rob Manuel
#96. How can those who are invested with the power of government be prevented from the abuse of those powers as the means of aggrandizing themselves? ... Without a strong constitution to counteract the strong tendency of government to disorder and abuse there can be little progress or improvement.
John C. Calhoun
#97. People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped by influence, by power, by us.
Wendell Berry
#98. A cold chill shot down my spine. How the hell did this freaking ass-hat have any position of authority? Power was supposed to be earned, not handed to the first idiotic dimwit willing to abuse it.
Cameo Renae
#99. Under the Bush administration, openness and accountability have been replaced by secrecy and evasion of responsibility. They abuse their power, conceal their actions from the American people, and refuse to hold officials accountable.
Edward Kennedy
#100. Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it.
George Washington
