Source: Before the Sabbath (1979), p. 40-41
Context: The best education will not immunize a person against corruption by power. The best education does not automatically make people compassionate. We know this more clearly than any preceding generation. Our time has seen the best-educated society, situated in the heart of the most civilized part of the world, give birth to the most murderously vengeful government in history.
Forty years ago the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought it self-evident that you would get a good government if you took power out of the hands of the acquisitive and gave it to the learned and the cultivated. At present, a child in kindergarten knows better than that.
“The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.”
“Immunity corrupts; absolute immunity corrupts absolutely.”
Editorial in Analog Science Fiction/Fact magazine (1970)
"Some Notes on Workers’ Education" in New International, Vol.2, No.7 http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/muste/1935/12/workereduc.htm (December 1935), p. 225.
“Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation.”
Sam Harris, "The View From The End Of The World" (9 December 2005)
2000s
Context: The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
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.
“It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.”
Nadia Chernyshevski
Green Mars (1993)
“Cabinet governments educate the nation; the presidential does not educate it, and may corrupt it.”
No. I, "The Cabinet", p. 19
The English Constitution (1867)
“It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
Source: General sources, Chapterhouse Dune (1985)
Context: All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.
“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.”
