Top 60 Quotes About Corrupt Power
#1. What worried Roosevelt was the inability of ordinary people to see the danger of this proliferation of cogs and cylinders and coins in American life.23 The corrupt power of corporations was increasing at an alarming rate,
Edmund Morris
#2. We're taught Lord Acton's axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don't believe it's always true any more. Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.
Robert Caro
#3. Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.
William Gaddis
#4. Power doesn't corrupt. It's neutral. Someone always wants to corrupt power. It's the way a shotgun is not a deadly weapon until someone chooses to use it irrationally.
Steve Ditko
#5. Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
George Bernard Shaw
#6. Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can't win ... the view that American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#7. Probably in all history there is no instance of a society in which ecclesiastical power was dominant which was not at once stagnant, corrupt and brutal.
George Agnew Reid
#8. Power does not corrupt people, people corrupt people.
William Gaddis
#9. Jimmy Meng sought to be a power broker in the halls of justice. But the influence he sought to peddle was corrupt, and his power was illusory.
Loretta Lynch
#10. Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.
Frank Herbert
#11. Power has always corrupted, my dear. Even the promise of power. It is a hard thing to look at through the fence for hundreds of years without wondering what it would be like on the other side.
Ally Carter
#12. We overestimate the power of people who become cogs in giant organizations. The fact that they become cogs actually limits what they can do ... There's something very corrupting that happens to people who think they're going to work from inside a corrupt system.
Howard Zinn
#13. The Creator wants us to drum. He wants us to corrupt the world with drum, dance and chants. After all, we have already corrupted the world with power and greed ... which hasn't gotten us anywhere - now's the time to corrupt the world with drum, dance and chants.
Babatunde Olatunji
#14. This bill, by vesting the power to withhold or terminate Federal funds, creates a concentration of power of economic coercion unequaled in the history of governments-a power concentration which defies the experience of mankind with the temptation of power to corrupt.
Strom Thurmond
#15. It has been said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but many it not be truer to say that to be absolutely powerful a man must first corrupt himself?
Terence Rattigan
#16. If knowledge is power and power corrupt, does knowledge corrupt?
James Moore
#17. Over the years, Western governments have been criticized for working with foreign police who have proved abusive or corrupt.
Samantha Power
#18. Absolute power doesn't corrupt, but rather, reveals character.
Orrin Woodward
#19. Power tends to corrupt. But the power in Washington resides in Congress, if it wants to use it. It can do anything - it can stop the Vietnam War, it can make its will felt, if it can ever get its act together to do anything.
Antonin Scalia
#21. I know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude - we've proven that time and time again. People are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and force action. They kill and revive, corrupt and cure.
Dan Abnett
#22. Great power does not corrupt a person, it only brings their true self into the light,
Kim Harrison
#23. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
#24. Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.
William Hazlitt
#25. If absolute power corrupts absolutely,
does absolute powerlessness make you pure?
Harry Shearer
#26. Power will always corrupt those who have not learned to serve it properly" -Lurline
Danielle Paige
#27. 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.
Jane Jacobs
#28. There is a bizarre notion according to which it is claimed that because men are corrupt, it is necessary to give certain of them all the more power ... on the contrary, they must be given less power.
Benjamin Constant
#29. It is supposed that power corrupts,' the caterpillar said in a voice as untroubled as time itself. yet the powerful are often corrupt before they are powerful. In fact, I find that they too often become powerful by being corrupt. Whether real or perceived, a lack of power can also corrupt.
Frank Beddor
#30. Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts ... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
John Steinbeck
#31. But so long as power remains by itself on one side, and enlightenment and wisdom isolated on the other, wise men will rarely think of great things, princes will more rarely carry out fine actions, and the people will continue to be vile, corrupt, and unhappy.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#32. Knowledge is power, isn't that what we say? But power corrupts. An institution based on knowledge and learning can't help but be a corrupt institution.
Sam Cabot
#34. What quantities evil - the amount of blood spilled the body count, the intentional destruction of innocent masses? Regardless of how evil is defined, there will always be those in power to discriminately judge it and their corrupt policing forces that enforce it.
Mahima Martel
#35. Worldly institutions fail because they require power and gold to operate. Power and gold attract wicked and greedy people. Wicked and greedy people are corrupters and betrayers. Therefore, worldly institutions become corrupt and betrayed ...
Kage Baker
#36. We find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt ends
the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.
Friedrich Engels
#37. The problem is that too often the only people who can act don't want change. Power doesn't so much corrupt as it breeds conservatism.
Jack McDevitt
#38. There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.
Zephyr Teachout
#39. The protestors feel that the elections have been hijacked and the choices are between two corrupt parties - that when the power structure no longer represents the people, the vote is no longer a tool for change [Jehane Noujaim, "Tahrir Square, Cairo: Lost and Found in the Square"].
Catie Marron
#40. When people who are seeking change start out, they are driven by commitment to a cause. But as internecine power struggles take over, one-time idealists fall prey to corruption. They become just as corrupt and manipulative as the system that they want to overthrow.
Anurag Kashyap
#41. Irresponsible power is inconsistent with liberty, and must corrupt those who exercise it.
John C. Calhoun
#42. The corporate government is heavily influenced by the utility company cartel.
Steven Magee
#43. Power is a corruption, and any society which operates from a power base is a corrupt society.
Jean Ure
#44. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Lord Acton
#45. Our world is very dishonest, and our leaders encourage dishonesty by setting bad examples - by lying, being corrupt, and using political sleight of hand to sustain power.
Stuart Wilde
#46. No matter how hard Evil tries, it can never quite match up to the power of Good, because Evil is ultimately self-destructive. Evil may set out to corrupt others, but in the process corrupts itself.
John Connolly
#47. I don't actually subscribe to the view that all power corrupts. But absolute power - when secured on the back of massive parliamentary majorities, which don't reflect the balance of political opinion in the country - can corrupt absolutely.
Charles Kennedy
#48. My view of civilization is that there have always been small pockets of good, decent, kind people surrounded by corrupt and evil power structures. It's always a battle to stay on the side of good.
Nancy Farmer
#49. There are some power-abusing, corrupt monsters in our federal government that despise me because I have the audacity to speak the truth.
Ted Nugent
#50. The power of a corrupt government is located in the ignorance and indifference of its people - rjs
Rassool Jibraeel Snyman
#51. Everything is destroyed by its own particular vice: the destructive power resides within. Rust destroys iron, moths destroy clothes, the worm eats away the wood; but greatest of all evils is envy, impious habitant of corrupt souls, which ever was, is, and shall be a consuming disease.
Menander
#52. Power corrupts the best of men.
Power destroys the worst of men.
Corrupt nations end up in turmoil.
Corrupt rulers end up in Hell.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#53. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.
Audre Lorde
#54. In England pensions used to be given to aristocrats, because aristocrats had political influence, in order to corrupt them. Here pensions are given to the great democratic mass, because they have political power, to corrupt them.
William Graham Sumner
#55. Power does not corrupt; it merely elevates the degree in which something is done that has already been pursued.
Felix O. Hartmann
#56. 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
#57. Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who posses it; and this I know, my lords: that where law ends, tyranny begins.
William Pitt
#58. There's a general assumption now that every man in a position of power is or will soon be corrupt and oppressive. Yet the Greeks understood and praised a positive male energy that has accepted authority.
Robert Bly
#59. We don't have the right to bear arms because of burglars; we have the right to bear arms to resist the supreme power of a corrupt and abusive government.
Vince Vaughn
#60. The bishop did not whistle. We believe that they lose the power of doing so on being consecrated; and that in these days one might as easily meet a corrupt judge as a whistling bishop; but he looked as though he would have done so, but for his apron.
Anthony Trollope
