“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
Lord Acton, 1887 · English historian, John Dalberg-Acton
Chapter 7
On Power
“Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power.”
Robert G. Ingersoll, 1883 · American orator, speaking of Lincoln
“Glaucon imagines a ring that makes its wearer invisible, and says no man would keep his hands off what was not his own. Wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust.”
Plato, c. 380 BC · Greek philosopher, the ring of Gyges
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”
Frederick Douglass, 1857 · abolitionist and orator
“A State for one man is no State at all.”
Sophocles, c. 441 BC · Greek tragedian, Haemon answering his father Creon
“There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it.”
Laozi, c. 400 BC · Chinese sage, founder of Taoist thought
Ordinary volunteers, told by a man in a lab coat to keep going, delivered what they believed were dangerous shocks to a stranger. Twenty-six of forty went all the way to the last switch.
Stanley Milgram, 1963 · social psychologist, Yale obedience studies
Asked to draw the letter E on their own forehead, people primed to feel powerful were three times more likely to draw it facing themselves. Power narrows the view to your own.
Adam Galinsky, Joe Magee, M. Ena Inesi and Deborah Gruenfeld, 2006 · social psychologists
The famous prison study is now read with caution. Archival work shows the guards were coached toward cruelty rather than falling into it, which is a different and quieter warning about how orders travel.
Thibault Le Texier, 2019 · researcher who examined the Stanford Prison Experiment archives
“Who is mighty? He who subdues his inclination. Who is he that is honored? He who honors his fellow human beings.”
Ben Zoma, c. 200 AD · Jewish sage of the second century
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