The following quotations constitute a body of independent evidence, if you will, that wealth & power are addictions and addictors. Most were found in two compilations of quotation by the great George Seldes:  The Great Quotations and The Great Thoughts.

"Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with habit (Bertrand Russell, 1951)."

"Real politics is the possession and distribution of power (Benjamin Disraeli, 1804 - 1881)."

"Many addictions can be far more dangerous than addiction to drugs. The addiction to power (M. Scott Peck, 1993)."

"Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it (William Pitt, 1770)"

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton, 1887)."

"The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgments of reason and perverts its liberty (Immanuel Kant, ca. 1800)."

"I see that power intoxicates men (Camille Desmoulins, 1794)."

"Power buries those who wield it (Talmud)."

"There is no stronger test of a man's character than power and authority, exciting as they do every passion and discovering every latent vice (Plutarch, 46-120 A.D.)"

"For he that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the basis of human nature need read but the history of this, or any age, to be convinced to the contrary (John Locke, 1690)."

"Arbitrary power is the natural object of temptation to a prince, as wine and women to a young fellow, or a bribe to a judge, or avarice to old age... (Jonathan Swift, 1706)."

"An honest private man often grows cruel and abandoned when converted into an absolute prince. Give a man a power of doing what he pleases with impunity, you extinguish his fear, and consequently overturn in him one of the great pillars of morality (Joseph Addison, 1672 - 1719)."

"Craving for power is not a vice of the body, consequently it knows none of the limitations imposed by a tired or satiated physiology upon gluttony, intemperance and lust (Aldous Huxley, 1940)."

"I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death (Thomas Hobbes, 1651)."

"Anyone entrusted with power will abuse it if not also animated with love and truth and virtue, no matter whether he be a prince, or one of the people (Jean de la Fontaine, 1668)."

"Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it and to carry authority as far as it will go (Baron Charles Montesquieu, 1748)."

"The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people (Wendell Phillips, 1832)."

"Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power (George Bernard Shaw, 1940)."

"Titles are tinsel, power a corruptor, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth a libel on its possessor (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1812)."

"In order to understand the system in which we live and help move it toward recovery, the time has come to admit, without reservation, that it is an addict and functions on a societal level the same way as any decompensating or deteriorating drunk (Dr. Anne Wilson Schaef, 1987)."

"Those who have once been intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, can never willingly abandon it (Edmund Burke, 1727-1797)."

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Wealth Addiction

"He who knows when he has enough is rich (Lao-Tzu. ca. 565 B. C.)"

"Everything in excess is opposed to nature (Hippocrates, ca. 400 B.C.)"

"Luxury and avarice—these pests have been the ruin of every state (Cato, 234-149 B.C.)"

"The greatest crimes are due to excess rather than want (Aristotle)."

"The poor have little, beggars none, the rich too much, enough not one (Benjamin Franklin, 1743)."

"The production of wealth is not the work of any one man and the acquisition of great fortune is not possible without the cooperation of multitudes of men (Peter Cooper, l79l-1883)."

"The rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer, and the vessel of state is driven between anarchy and despotism (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1821)."

"The rich get rich and the poor get poorer...(from song 'Ain't We Got Fun' by Gus Kahn, Bernard Eagan, Richard Whiting, 1921)."

"To have plenty is to be confused. He who knows when he has enough is rich (Lao Tze, ca. 565 B. C.)"

"The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion (Aristotle, 384 - 322 B. C.)"

"A great fortune is a great slavery (Seneca, 4 B. C. - 65 A. D.)"

"His money owns him rather than he owns it. (St. Cyprian, ca. 200 A. D.)"

"Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding; it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant, accommodates itself to the meanest capacities. silences the loud and clamorous, and brings over the most obstinate and inflexible (Joseph Addison, 1711)."

"The only vice that I perceive in the universe is Avarice; all the others, whatever name they be known by, are only variations, degrees, of this one (Morelly, ca. 1750.)"

"Gold is a living god and rules in scorn, all earthly things but virtue (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1810)."

"Only the paranoid survive (former Intel Corp. CEO Andrew S. Grove, 2000)."

"Thy riches be not thy own, but thou art but a steward over them (Bishop Hugh Latimer, 1548)."

"Of great riches there is no real use, except in their distribution; the rest is but conceit (Francis Bacon, 1625)."

"The affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many (Adam Smith, 1776)."

"A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surp1us in banks (US Vice President John C. Calhoun, 1836)."

" Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing. This concentration is seriously impairing the economic effectiveness of private enterprise as a way of providing employment for labor and capital and as a way of assuring a more equitable distribution of income and earnings among the people of the nation as a whole (US President Frank Delano Roosevelt, 1938)."

"A line you'll never hear on a pirate ship is 'let's divvy up the money equally' (Jay Leno, 1992)."

"People of the same trade seldom meet together but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some diversion to raise prices (Adam Smith, 1776)."

"All personal secrets have the effect of sin or guilt (Carl Gustav Jung, 1875-l96l)."

"sec're-tary, n.; one entrusted with secrets, from L. secretum, a secret. 2. a general official in overall charge of such work. 3. an official in charge of a department of government (Webster's Dictionary)."

"Gold and riches, the chief causes of war (Tacitus, 115 A.D.)."

"War seldom enters but where wealth allures (John Dryden, 1687)."

"War is the child of Pride, and Pride the daughter of Riches (Jonathan Swift, 1697)."

"The enthusiasm for war, and the predatory temper of which it is the index, prevail in the largest measure among the upper classes, especially among the hereditary leisure class (Thorstein Veblen, 1899)."

"This war was a commercial and industrial war, not a political war (Woodrow Wilson, 1919)."

"Wars are caused by undefended wealth (Douglas MacArthur, 1945)."

"We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist (Dwight David Eisenhower, 1961)."

"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage (John Kenneth Galbraith, 1971)."

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism (Mary McCarthy, 1958)."

"No government can exist without taxation. The money must necessarily be levied on the people; and the grand art consists of levying so as not to oppress (Frederick the Great, 1777)."

"An unlimited power to tax, involves, necessarily, the power to destroy (Daniel Webster, 1819)."

"To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder (Benjamin Disraeli, 1850)."

"I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes and a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate (Theodore Roosevelt, 1910)."

"Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves against the overtaxed (Bernard Berenson, 1956?)."

"Nine men in ten are suicides." "Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad habits." "Three good meals a day is bad living." "Drive thy business. Let not that drive thee." "Many estates were lost in the getting." "Success has ruined many a man." (From Poor Richard's Almanack by Benjamin Franklin, 1743)

"A nation never falls but by suicide (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1865)."

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More on Power Addiction

"The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1951)."

"Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise it will last; but nothing in this world is certain but death and taxes (Benjamin Franklin, 1789)."

"Dictators ride to and fro on the backs of tigers, and the tigers are getting hungry (Winston Churchill, 1936)."

"It is not power itself, but the legitimation of the lust for power that corrupts absolutely (R.H. Crossman, 1951)."

"The tyrant is always stirring up some war or other in order that the people may require a leader (Plato, 428-348 B.C.)

"Power is an end in itself (Milovan Djilas, 1911-1995 )."

Central Addicted Person

"Any excuse will serve a tyrant (Aesop, 620-560 B.C.)"

"The worst ruler is one who cannot rule himself (Cato, 234-149 B.C.)."

"The human mind is prone to pride even when not supported by power; how much more, then, does it exalt itself when it has that support? (Pope Gregory I, 540 - 604 A.D.)"

"For where the instrument of intelligence is added is added to brute power and evil will, mankind is powerless in his own defense (Dante, 1320)."

"A plausible insignificant word, in the mouth of a demagogue is a dangerous and deceitful weapon (Robert South, 1634-1716)."

"If you would be powerful, pretend to be powerful (Horne Tooke, 1736-1812)."

"Power gradually extirpates from the mind every human and gentle virtue. Pity, benevolence, friendship, are things unknown in high stations (Edmund Burke, 1756)."

"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves (William Hazlitt, 1778-1830)."

"Power is not happiness (William Goodwin, 1793)."

"Men in power have no opinion, but may be had cheap for any opinion, for any purpose (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882)."

"Who shall count up the evil brood that is born from power--the pitiful fear, the madness, the despair, the overpowering craving for revenge, the treachery, the unmeasured cruelty? Auberon Herbert, 1893)."

"What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering (George Bernard Shaw, 1905)."

"A friend in power is a friend lost (Henry B. Adams, 1907)."

"The love of power is generally an embodiment of fear (Bertrand Russell, 1931)."

The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness (Eric Fromm, 1941)."

"Increase of material wealth does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth (Ghandi)."

"The men who really wield, retain, and covet power are the kind who answer bedside telephones whike making love (Nicholas Pileggi)."

"It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable (Eric Hoffer, 1954)."

"Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other (Carl Gustav Jung, 1954)."

"My concern is whether America can overcome the fatal arrogance of power (J. William Fulbright, 1966)."

"Men in power have not the time to read; yet men who do not read are unfit for power (Michael Foot)."

"Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless (Henry Kissenger, 1973)."

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Secrecy

"Arbitrary power has seldom or never been introduced into a country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step, lest the people should perceive its approach (Lord Chesterfield, 1737)."

"Power is gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant and consistent (Samuel Johnson, 1774)."

"It is apprehended that arbitrary power would steal in upon us, were we not careful to prevent its progress (David Hume, 1741)."

"Monarchy would not have continued so many ages in the world had it not been for the abuses it protects. It is the master of fraud which shelters all others (Thomas Paine, 1792)."

"It is the people with secret attractions to various temptations, who busy themselves with removing those temptations from other people; really they are defending themselves under the pretext of defending others, because at heart they fear their own weaknesses (Ernest Jones, 1918)."

"Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power (Bertrand Russell, 1952)."

"I have been a conspirator for so long that I mistrust all around me (Gamal Abdel Nasser, 1958)."

"The greatest worry of all our dictators is to be found out by their own people (Richard Mowrer, 1970)."

"Eperience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny (Thomas Jefferson, 1778)."

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Synergetic Increase

"For the nature of power is in this point, like to fame, increased as it proceeds; or like the motion of heavy bodies, which the further they go, make still the more haste (Thomas Hobbes, 1651)."

"Power may be justly compared to a great river which, while kept within its bounds is both beautiful and useful, but when it overflows its banks, is then too impetuous to be stemmed, it bears down on all before it and brings destruction and desolation wherever it goes (Andrew Hamilton, 1735)."

"The greater the powers, the more dangerous the abuse (Edmund Burke, 1771)."

"Immoderate power, like other intemperance, leaves the progeny weaker and weaker, until Nature, in compassion, covers it with her mantle and is seen no more (Walter Landora, 1824)."

"...the arrogation of more and more power, and the gradual transition into absolutism (Francis Lieber, 1859)."

"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 the holders of power, increasing as the power increases (Lord Acton, 1887)."

"Monopoly is business at the end of its journey (Henry Lloyd, 1894)."

"Habit has familiarized men's minds with the idea of national power spreading (Henry Brooks Adams, 1900)."

"The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent but command (Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr., 1913)."

"Down the past, civilizations have exposited themselves in terms of power, of world-power, and of other-world power (Jack London, 1876-1916)."

"Growing with every successive satisfaction, the appetite for power can manifest itself indefinitely, without interruption by bodily fatigue or sickness."; "Instead of bringing to the power lover a respite from his addictions, old age is apt to intensify them by making it easier for him to satisfy his cravings on a larger scale and in a more spectacular way (Aldous Huxley, 1940)."

"Power abdicates only under the stress of more power (Martin Buber, 1950)."

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Gateway Tendency

"All wealth is power, so power must inevitably draw wealth to itself by some means or other (Edmund Burke, 1780)."

"It is impossible to divorce property from power (John Randolf, 1773-1833)."

"Ambition is in fact the avarice of power (Charles Caleb Colton, 1829)."

"When you come to analyze the love of money you find...desire of power, of social position and reputation for ability and success (Edward Bellamy, 1887)."

"Those who have economic power have civil power also (George W. Russell, 1913)."

"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism (Carl Gustav Jung)."

"The problem of power is how to get men of power to live for the public not off the public (Robert F. Kennedy, 1964)."

"People's ambition begins to grow as they feel the attraction of power (Shirley Williams, 1981)."

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Compulsive Loyalty

"As to the people, they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them (Plato)."

"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those they suppress (Frederick Douglas, 1817-1895)."

"The man with power, but without conscience, could, with an eloquent tongue, if he cared for nothing but his own power, put his whole country in flame, because this whole country believes that something is wrong, and is eager to follow those who profess to be able to lead it out of its difficulties (Woodrow Wilson, 1911)."

"Sacrifice yourself for your country (Generalissimo Franco, 1892-1975)."

Dysfunctional Beliefs, Impaired Thinking

"Laugh to scorn the power of man, for none of woman born shall harm Macbeth (Shakespeare)."

"What is good? All that elevates the feeling of power, the will to power, the power itself in man (Friedrich Neitzhe, 1888)."

"Who cares about the law. Hain't I got the power? (Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1783-1862)."

"The way to have power is to take it ("Boss" Tweed, 1823-1878)."

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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both (Louis Brandeis, 1941)." "Until the age of 12 I believed that everybody had a house on 5th Avenue, a villa in Newport, and a steam-driven ocean-going yacht (Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.)."

"The good Lord gave me my money (John D. Rockefeller, 1894)."

"Anybody has a right to evade taxes if he can get away with it (J. Pierpont Morgan, 1837-1913)."

"If you can actually count your money you are not a rich man (John Paul Getty, 1976)."

"Great wealth always supports the party in power, no matter how corrupt it may be. It never exerts itself for reform for it instinctively fears change (Henry George, 1894)."

"He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft (James Russell Lowell, 1870)."

"I think all our human experience shows that no one with absolute power can be trusted to give it up even in part (Louis Brandeis, 1913)."

"The struggle is always between the sacred right of an individual to express himself, and the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression, and obedience (William O. Douglas, 1980)."

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Addicted Society

"A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to monarchs or mobs or monarchs (Epicurus, 321-270 B.C.)"

The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority...men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses, and interests of men as individuals (James Fenimore Cooper, 1840)."

"It is not from top to bottom that societies die; it is from bottom to top (Henry George, 1879)."

"The effect of unlimited power on limited minds...must represent the same process in society (Henry B. Adams, 1907)."

"Just now the favorite ideological psychological candidate for control of human activity is love of power (John Dewey, 1939)."

"Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many (Eric Hoffer, 1963)."

Addicted Individuals Within An Addicted Society

"Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other, and in either division there are smaller ones (Plato)."

"First they slander the wealthy and rouse them against the government, thus causing opposite parties to unite against a common danger. Next, they produce the same result by stirring up the populace and creating a sense of insecurity (Aristotle)."

"Tyrants use their power in three manners. The first is, that they strive that those under their mastery be ignorant and fearful, because, when they be such, they may not rise against them, nor resist their wills; and the second is, that their victims not be kindly and united among themselves, in such a wise that they trust not each other; and the third way is that they strive to make them poor, and to put them under great undertakings, which they can never finish, whereby they may have so much harm that it may never come into their hearts to devise anything against their ruler (Alfonso X, King of Castile, 1226-1284)."

"Arbitrary power is a thing that men begin to weary of, in kings and churchmen, they struggle between them mutually to uphold civil and ecclesiastical tyranny (Oliver Cromwell, 1650)."

"Kingcraft and priestcraft have fell out so often, that 'tis a wonder this grand and ancient alliance has not broken off forever (James Otis, 1764)."

"A landed interest, a mercantile interest, a money interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations and divide them into different classes actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these varying and interfering interests frms the principle task of modern legislation (James Madison, 1788)."

"When once you have plunged into the strife for power, it is the fear that those who are seeking for power over you that so easily persuades to all the great crimes (Auberon Herbert, 1893)."

"The economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power (Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1934)."

"What good does it do the world for the governments to sit down at peace tables and to work out fine political mechanisms if they leave the instruments of economic and technical power in the hands of unrestrained private individuals and corporations? (Harley Kilgore, 1893-1956)."

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The Codependency

"In all systems of human relationship, from the family to the superstate, there is an element of coercion, and this element, whenever it occurs and in whatever degree it is significant or controlling, we conveniently designate it as 'power' (C. Wright Mills, 1956)."

"What good fortune for those in power that people do not think (Hitler).

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Gender

"There never was any government, so purely popular, as not to require the exclusion of the poor, of strangers, of women, and minors from the public council (Hugo Grotius, 1625)."

"All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys, the champions and enthusiasts of the state (Herman Melville, 1819-1891)."

"Men fight wars because the women are watching (Lawrence of Arabia, 1888-1935)."

 

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George Seldes, 1890-1995