Lord Acton Quotes

Brutal men with unlimited power are the same all over the world.

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.

Power tends to corrupt if you're there too long.

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people.

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.

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

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

... all of our human experience shows that no one with absolute power can be trusted to give it up even in part.

That which killed my late master, & so many of his predecessors. The responsibility of arbitrary power.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations perverted it into tyranny.

Politicians as a class are dangerous, that people who are seeking power over us are not, by definition, our friends.

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.

Whoever is new to power is always harsh.

History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

It's the tyranny of an oligarchy that I'm concerned about.

A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases.

The most monstrous men a plea of power in the history of the world

It is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power.

Feelings of marginalization and cries of separation are symptomatic of countries where rulers find power sweet and intoxicating, where power is coveted, and when acquired, painstakingly guarded.

Despotism, be it financial or political, is vulnerable, unless it is believed to rest upon a moral sanction.

If you give human beings power over others, their natural tendency is to be fascists.

The shortest way to ruin a country is to give power to demogogues.