Lord Acton Quotes

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

Enlightened despots are mythical creatures; real despots seem more interested in stealing money or installing their sons after them.

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

Degeneracy follows every autocratic system of violence, for violence inevitably attracts moral inferiors. Time has proven that illustrious tyrants are succeeded by scoundrels.

If monarchy is corrupting - and it is - wait till you see what overt empire does to us.

Whoever is new to power is always harsh.

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

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.

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.

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

Yes, citizens, Iturbide was a traitor, a hypocrite and an impious man who destroyed the assembly in which the people had deposited their sovereignty in order to appropriate it all to himself

Absolute power should never be trusted to man. It has perverted the wisest heads, and corrupted the best hearts in the world. I should be afraid to commit my property, liberty and life to a body of angels for one whole year.

Some of the defendants say that dictatorship can be good if there is a good dictator. But I say that a man cannot stay good if he becomes a dictator. Authoritarianism is a system that destroys man's morality. If you take a saint and give him power, he will change into a Hitler or a devil.

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

Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power.

An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and Russia to-day.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.

The possession of unlimited power corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding.

What is more cruel than a tyrant's ear?

Clever tyrants are never punished.

Despotism increases in severity with the number of despots; the responsibility is more divided, and the claims are more numerous.

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

Every one of the world's dictatorships can and does claim to be acting in the name of the people.

All men would be tyrants if they could.