Free Speech and Plain Language (1936)
Context: I had a desultory talk with one devotee of expediency not long ago, a good friend and a thoroughly excellent man. He was all worked up over the activities of Communists and what he called pink Socialists, especially in the colleges and churches. He said they were corrupting the youth, and he was strong for having them coerced into silence. I could not see it that way. I told him it seemed pretty clear that Mr. Jefferson was right when he said that the effect of coercion was "to make one half the people fools and the other half hypocrites, and to support roguery and error all over the earth"; look at Germany and Italy! I thought our youth could manage to bear up under a little corrupting — they always have — and if they were corrupted by Communism, they stood a first-rate chance to get over it, whereas if they grew up fools or hypocrites, they would never get over it.
I added that Mr. Jefferson was right when he said that "it is error alone which needs the support of government; truth can stand by itself." One glance at governments anywhere in the world proves that. Well, then, the surest way to make our youth suspect that there may be something in Communism would be for the government to outlaw it.
“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.”
As quoted in Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told in the Lives of their Liberators (1918) by William Spence Robertson, p. 239
The Angostura Address (1819)
Sergeant Patrick Harper to Lieutenant Robert Knowles, regarding Captain Sharpe's grumpy attitude, p. 9
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Gold (1981)
“It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.”
Nadia Chernyshevski
Green Mars (1993)
“Ever since I was born I have never been involved in corruption and I will never be corrupt.”
From the steps of the Johannesburg Public Library after his rape acquittal on 8 May 2006, Manto: Media sensationalised Zuma's shower statement http://mg.co.za/article/2006-05-11-manto-media-sensationalised-zumas-shower-statement, M&G, 11 May 2006
