A Quote by Tacitus

Lust of power is the most flagrant of all the passions.

Tacitus

Quote Topics

Lust Most Passions Power

Quote Author

Tacitus
Roman - Historian
55 - 120

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all the passions." Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise. Business offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office.

Barbara Tuchman

Of all the worldly passions, lust is the most intense. All other worldly passions seem to follow in its train.

Gautama Buddha

The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention.

Thucydides

Perhaps as good a classification as any of the main types is that of the three lusts distinguished by traditional Christianity - the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power.

Irving Babbitt

Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.

Marquis de Sade

If we weren't born with anti-social passions - narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious - why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?

Dennis Prager

Flagrant evils cure themselves by being flagrant.

John Henry Newman

Most humans know their own "reason" only in the sense that Hume defined it, as "a slave to the passions"-and by "passions" he meant not moral passions or the passions of transcendent genius, but only low appetites or base desires, which society and economy ultimately shape and spur on in us.

Kenny Smith

Only when we rid ourselves of passions and lust and put the desires of flesh under the control of Spirit, only then we accept the cross and follow Christ. And "withdrawal from the world" is nothing but the destruction of passions and manifestation of the innermost life in Christ.

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Antonov

Anxiety and lust are evicting the older passions.

Mason Cooley

Thus, experience has ever shown, that education, as well as religion, aristocracy, as well as democracy and monarchy, are, singly, totally inadequate to the business of restraining the passions of men, of preserving a steady government, and protecting the lives, liberties, and properties of the people . . . . Religion, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest, and power, which can be resisted only by passions, interest, and power.

John Adams

Anger, lust and such other evil passions raging in the heart are the real untouchables.

Mahatma Gandhi

Deep in the darkness of passions insanity, I felt taken by lust's strange inhumanity.

Michael Jackson

It's the ones who can't let go - of fear or anger, lust or greed, vanity or pride or power - who are most at risk of becoming corrupted.

Kate Elliott

Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust.