Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.
Interpretation
Absolute power leads to unchecked authority and can result in devastating consequences.
This quote by Rudolph Rummel highlights the dangers associated with absolute power. It suggests that when individuals or entities hold unchecked authority, the likelihood of catastrophic outcomes increases significantly, often leading to oppression, violence, and moral corruption. It serves as a warning against the concentration of power in a single entity or individual, emphasizing that power, when unrestrained, can corrupt and destroy.
In practice
In a political debate to illustrate the dangers of dictatorship.
[During the 20th century] ... 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners.
Majorities, as such, afford no guarantees for justice. They are men of the same nature as minorities. They have the same passions for fame, power, and money, as minorities; and are liable and likely to be equally - perhaps more than equally, because more boldly - rapacious, tyrannical and unprincipled, if intrusted with power.
Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.
I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.
With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her.
White privilege is the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements benefits and choices bestowed on people solely because they are white. Generally white people who experience such privilege do so without being conscious of it.
His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.
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