Best 28 quotes in «absolute power quotes» category

Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want absolute power.

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.

If you are my food, how am I supposed to feel pity towards you? That would mean starvation for me. “A hungry leopard told a fallen, panting, imploring gazelle

How do you behave when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute: what then?

I think this business of good vs. evil is of no interest to the power hungry

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

It's unfortunate to be bitten by political ambition. The deadly disease causes a man to want to access power by all means either by sacrificing others to its altar or by sacrificing himself when he fails.

Once you are in power, never forget those who put you there. Deal with those who think they can do better than you and those who think you are god's representative on earth. Deal with each other according to his actions

There is an absolute power that truly empowers without corrupting

Powerless=lifeless.

The character of Superman is a rebuttal of Lord Acton's famous dictum: he has absolute power, but it does not corrupt him. Rather, his power grants him freedom from fear. This freedom allows him to be a superman, and to realize his potential by helping others.

The greatest proof of power is the mass grave, the camp as a field of the dead. However, total power here cancels itself. Death is the absolute antisocial fact. For that reason, the absolute power to kill can never become total. In order to escape this dilemma, it constantly searches out new victims, defining new groups of opponents. Everyone is on terror's proscription list - extended to its logical conclusion, all of humankind.

Absolute power is absolute power, no matter what it's called.

Great men are almost always bad men.

Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.

If you can't trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?

Powerlessness corrupts: absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.

I made mistakes. My supporters and I failed to prevent a main like [Mikhail] Saakashvili from acquiring absolute power. I should have criticized him earlier on.

Master of the universe but not of myself, I am the only rebel against my absolute power.

Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.

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

You have the absolute power to change someone's life with kindness.

A fire burned in his belly with Helen's words, her challenge laid bare. Are you a king worthy of great glory, or a pretender clamoring for attention at the edge of the world? One look to Menelaus was all the reminder Agamemnon needed of how much he detested that comparison.

As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.

That's what Judith Herman is saying, and she's absolutely right. Power then breeds an intensification of all because the power can never be absolute power - to some extent it's stymied - but the isolation while in power becomes even more dangerous. Think of it as a vicious circle. The power intensifies these tendencies and the tendencies become more dangerous because of the power.

The last thing our founding fathers wanted was to be ruled by king with absolute power, and the next to the last thing they wanted was to be ruled by a temporary king with absolute powers for four years.

The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.

Can anyone maintain power without lying? It looks to me like living without breathing. Morality apart, I think some evils are part and parcel of nature and we cannot do without them. Sometimes evil is even necessary to run this evil nature.