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—Lord Acton, letter to Bishop Creighton (1887)
power attracts the corruptible – suspect any who seek it—Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune (1985)
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops—Stephen Jay Gould, «wide hats and narrow minds» (1979)