Quotes About Power And Corruption

#1. If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.

Algernon Sidney

#2. I have a prejudice against people with money. I have known so many, and none have escaped the corruption of power. In this I am a purist. I love people motivated by love and not by power. If you have money and power, and are motivated by love, you give it all away.

Anais Nin

#3. I think the corruption of power is very interesting, and I think the idea that power is something that ... You know, when people want power, they're a certain individual. When people acquire power by accident, they're different again.

David Morrissey

#4. 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

#5. We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.

Eugene Jarecki

#6. Technological errors made by government, industry [DDT, ABM, SST, CIA, etc.] are those of children, who, even thought they don't know what the score is, go on playing pre-technological games of power and profit.

John Cage

#7. The American people, and the citizens of all Western nations, have the right to know about every single thing their representatives do on their behalf. After all, elected officials are merely representing those who hold the true power (the people).

James Morcan

#8. Kid gets caught with marijuana, that kid has a police record. A Wall Street executive destroys the economy, $5 billion settlement with the government, no criminal record. That is what power is about. That is what corruption is about. And that is what has to change in the United States of America.

Bernie Sanders

#9. When extraordinary power and extraordinary pay are allotted to any individual in a government, he becomes the center, round which every kind of corruption generates and forms.

Thomas Paine

#10. There's always someone bigger and badder who can knock you off your perch - even if you're me. Never forget it and you don't have to worry about corruption. You'll be too afraid with watching your own back.
Alexandria "Dria" McAndrews

C.J. Ellisson

#11. People power must be combined with good governance to bring about real, deep and lasting change. This combination can achieve almost everything from eliminating corruption to ending malnutrition and illiteracy.

Narendra Modi

#12. the majority of those in government were unprincipled, greedy, bigots and he wanted no part of that. If you weren't on the side of corruption taking place and the back room deals, you were not in the circle of power. Maybe one day after the US cleaned its house,

Toni Mariani

#13. There is an undeniable web connecting incidents such as the rise to power of dictators... poverty and the perception of human beings as disposable property.

Beatrice Rose Roberts

#14. You know what kind of person it takes to run for President? Not normal. They could start out okay, but by the time they reach that level they've sold their soul to the devil so many times and stomped the guts out of enough people that they are definitely not like you and me, not even close.

David Baldacci

#15. Power required corruption, and corruption rewarded power.

V.E Schwab

#16. There is an interesting interplay between power corrupting and corruption empowering. The causality does not go one way.

Bruce Bueno De Mesquita

#17. No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

Jacob Bronowski

#18. 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

#19. There is just too much cruelty, selfishness and corruption in the world not to want to crush the poisonous will of those who cause it by writing about it as powerfully as I can.

Carla H. Krueger

#20. True understanding involves sincere honesty and holistic, deep listening without the political corruption of evil power players. ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from my book K.H. trilogy

Angelica Hopes

#21. Weak men cannot handle power. It will either crush them, or they will use it to crush others

Jocelyn Murray

#22. Injustice and corruption will never be transformed by keeping them hidden, but only by bringing them out into the light and confronting them with the power of love.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#23. Fear is what created the monster in the room, and in order to overcome the many problems and enslavements that we have today, it is not about getting rid of the monster, but about getting rid of the fear.

Evita Ochel

#24. Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.

Thomas Jefferson

#25. The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.

Eric Hoffer

#26. One of the (many) problems with government is not that power corrupts or even that it is magnetic to corruptible people; rather, it is that we have been conditioned to tolerate corruption in power, and so we don't even try to hold our politicians accountable.

Michel Templet

#27. 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

#28. It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#29. As more money flowed through Washington and as Washington's power to regulate our lives grew, opportunities and temptations for graft, influence peddling and cutting corners grew exponentially. Power breeds corruption.

Steve Forbes

#30. A sixth sense is a miraculous thing, which in itself suggests a supernatural order. The human intellect, however, for all its power and triumphs, is largely formed by this world and is therefore corruptible.

Dean Koontz

#31. Come forward as servants of Islam, organize the people economically, socially, educationally and politically and I am sure that you will be a power that will be accepted by everybody.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

#32. Lijuan warned Raphael I'd make him a little bit mortal.'
'You have.' Quiet equanimity. 'And you worry you've weakened him. You have.'
Elena flinched. 'Elena.'
Shaking his head, Keir waited until she met his gaze again. 'Even an archangel needs a weakness - absolute power is a corruption.

Nalini Singh

#33. Power cannot be maintained and effectively exercised without a moral structure accepted and practiced by all because power attracts the corruptible and because corruption destroys consensus.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#34. 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

#35. Knowledge is power; power corrupts. Corruption brings shame and ruin. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it is perhaps preferable to a life lived in shame.

Lauren Kate

#36. Look, we know we screwed up when we were in the majority. We fell in love with power. We spent way too much money - especially on earmarks. There was too much corruption when we ran this place. We were guilty. And that's why we lost.

Eric Cantor

#37. When there is power there is corruption, free yourself from these vicissitudes and you will build an empire based on your beliefs.

Davey

#38. Naked power has its limitations, since power is a generator of corruption and corruption in its turn tends to dilute the effectiveness of power.

Robert Payne

#39. I'll confess that I don't watch the Olympics, but you'd have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the corruption and the expense. An amorphous organization with no transparency, unclear lines of responsibility, huge amounts of politics and a great deal of unearned power.

Seth Godin

#40. Deception and privileged secrets are common facets of politics.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

#41. 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

#42. The corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power.

Elliott Colla

#43. Might and wrong combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible attraction.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#44. Power is a corruption, and any society which operates from a power base is a corrupt society.

Jean Ure

#45. How can one betray oneself to such a degree? What corruption greater even than power can lead us to thus deny the proof of pleasure, to hold in contempt that which we have loved? ... I could have written about chouquettes my whole life long; and my whole life long, I wrote against them.

Muriel Barbery

#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. It is no accident, then, that each of our major wars has served to enhance the power of government in Washington: the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Edward S. Greenberg

#48. Lack of knowledge and skills, laziness, gluttony, over-indulgence, lustiness, anger, fear, greed and misuse of knowledge, power and designation are the sources of corruption in the government employees.

Dev Dantreliya

#49. The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage; and this when used with calmness and deliberation will prove strong enough.

Andrew Jackson

#50. 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

#51. ... In the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

#52. [There is a] strong correlation between market freedom and lower government corruption
not terribly surprising, since the effect of increasing regulatory power is to shift 'cheating' from the private to the public sphere.

Julian Sanchez

#53. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#54. No nation went into oblivion or was destroyed because it had bad laws, or because its statesmen were not intelligent, but because of INTERNAL CORRUPTION, and because they could not maintain the POWER OF SELF-CONTROL.

Melvin J. Ballard