“Critical power…tends to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail.”

— Matthew Arnold

The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)

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Matthew Arnold 166

English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector… 1822–1888

Theodore Levitt (1925–2006) American economist and professor at Harvard Business School

Theodore Levitt (1974). Marketing for business growth, p. 71

“It may indeed be true that in order to act we need a certain amount of self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. It may also be true that the very form of expression, in which we clothe our thoughts, tends to impose upon them an absolute tone.”

Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) Hungarian sociologist

Ideology and Utopia (1929)

“Moral training which does not encourage critical examination of popular ideas of what is right and good, does not tend to make men better, but only of one mind.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 183

“Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 78
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Letter http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1407&Itemid=283 to Mandell Creighton (5 April 1887), published in Historical Essays and Studies, by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1907), edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, Appendix, p. 504; also in Essays on Freedom and Power (1972)
Paraphrased variant: All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Context: I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. 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. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means.