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.
A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
In a heated argument we are apt to lose sight of the truth.
It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with you. I "heard voices" all the time as a small child.
Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.
Masonry is not a religion._x000D_ He who makes of it a religious belief, falsifies and denaturalizes it.
Humans treat animals as things that exist as means to human ends. That's morally wrong. Sexism promotes the idea that women are things that exist as means to the ends of men. That's morally wrong. We need to stop treating all persons - whether human or nonhuman - as things.
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