"Power corrupts people in small as well as big scale, I discovered. People with small powers use little irritants like flea bites, to assert control and punish."

Zoia Horn Science See all quotes by Zoia Horn →

React to this quote

More by Zoia Horn

“...if you dislike something enough to criticize it, what are you going to do about it? It was like a refrain, often uncomfortable, but one that could not be silenced.”

“How does one help change the treadmill into a road, or better still, a meandering path?”

“In Hitler's Germany, Jews were forced to wear identifying stars of David on their sleeves. Black people in the United States wore their identification all the time.”

“Those days revealed the banal cruelties that jails create and nurture. I saw people punished not only by being locked up but then by being degraded, treated capriciously, their personal dignity undermined, with no real recourse of appeal for fairness and justice.”

Resonant Thoughts

"I would like to stress, that if we want to strengthen strategic stability, we will require an equal dialogue with mutual consideration of each other’s interests. It is necessary to revive the channels…"

— Anatoly Antonov

1936

#power

"I don't believe in the god of the Christians who gave his son in order to save mankind. That's a myth. But why should it have arisen if it didn't express some deep-seated intuition in men? I don't kno…"

— W. Somerset Maugham

Literature1874–1965

#Human Nature

"There is what I call the American idea. I so name it, because it seems to me to lie at the basis of all our truly original, distinctive, and American institutions. It is itself a complex idea, compose…"

— Theodore Parker

Social Activism1810–1860

#justice

"Proponents of doctrinal religions—ones in which a particular body of belief is prized and infidels scorned—will be threatened by the courageous pursuit of knowledge. We hear from such people that it m…"

— Carl Sagan

Science1934–1996

#knowledge