Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced – in a word, insane. Frank Herbert
About This Quote

I have been reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera. It is a collection of essays. One essay in particular I found interesting was titled, The Critic as Hero. In the essay, Kundera states that when people are given power they become obsessed with their image, power corrupts the best of us, and power seems to attract the irrational elements of society.

He also states that power attracts psychopaths who want to rule others for their own gain or to prove that they are smarter than everyone else.I agree with Kundera in that I believe that when people are in positions where they can make decisions that affect many others, they will often overstep their boundaries and make decisions in ways that are not helpful. This is one reason why I believe in democracy, equality for all races, genders, cultures, religions, etc., without the government having to make laws for these groups. When people are free to make their own choices in regards to how they live their lives without being told what they should do or how they should act this creates a society where people respect each other and work together to create results for the good of each other.

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. - Unknown

  2. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grassthe world is too full to talk about. - Jalaluddin Rumi

  3. When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace. - Jimi Hendrix

  4. When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without... - Fred Rogers

  5. If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that's a problem. Peace and love are eternal. - John Lennon

More Quotes By Frank Herbert
  1. There is no escape–we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

  2. The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.

  3. Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power, " Tuek said. "You might find the line between life and death among the Fremen to be too sharp and quick.

  4. Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.

  5. Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class...

Related Topics