Jesse Ball Quotes

Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

Harassment is about power---the undue exercise of power by a superior over a subordinate.

Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it.

Give a man a free hand and he'll run it all over you.

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.

Powerlessness also corrupts.

There is no more contemptible poison than power over one's fellow men.

People who are in a position of power like to throw their weight around, and that becomes abuse.

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humilation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

Beware the tyranny of the weak. They just suck you dry.

You can be a control freak only when you have weak people around you.

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

Give a man a free hand and he'll try to put it all over you.

Those who make some other person their job... are dangerous.

Power is always a corrupting influence.

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.

And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.

The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.