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Power and Authority. “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”.
Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 3 April 1887, in Louise Creighton 'Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton' (1904) vol. 1, ch. 13. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. - Lord Acton quotes at AZquotes.com.
- Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton. Inspirational, Leadership, Work.
- The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
- Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
- And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.
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Definition:Having power corrupts a man, or lessens his morality, and the more power a man has, the more corrupted he will become. This idiom means that those in power often do not have the people’s best interests in mind. They are primarily focused on their own benefits, and they may abuse their position of power to help themselves. If you follow t...
Quotations of similar ideas have been around since the 1700s, often referring to the monarchs of the time. William Pitt the Elder, the British Prime Minister at the time, said in a speech in the House of Lords in 1770: “Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.” This idea was later expressed in an essay by Alphonse Marie ...
In the modern day, this idiom is used as an admonition against letting power change your character. It is not often said in conversation, and only occasionally appears in writing with a specific reference to it being an idiom. It does not flow naturally off the tongue. “People always say absolute power corrupts absolutely… I’m not surprised he spen...
“Absolute power, they say, corrupts absolutely. Brussels, the seat of power of the European Union, is learning that lesson the hard way… Unelected Brussels bureaucrats, drunk on centralized power a...
The quote Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely comes from the nineteenth-century English historian Lord Acton (1834–1902) in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton about how historians should judge the abuse of power by past rulers, especially popes.
Acton believes that the same moral standards should be applied to all men, political and religious leaders included, especially since, in his famous phrase, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”: Presidents, Kings, Tyrants, & Despots.
