Wit & Attitude Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw flips the moral cliché about power corrupting people and, in doing so, exposes a lazier consolation: that the system is to blame, not the individuals we elevate. His line is engineered like one of his plays - a neat inversion that sounds like common sense only after it’s already embarrassed your common sense. The sting is in the grammar. “Power” becomes the passive object, almost innocent, while “fools” are the active agents who “corrupt” it. That reversal is Shaw’s socialism with teeth: institutions aren’t cursed by nature; they’re misused by the unfit, the vain, the poorly educated, the self-deluded.

The subtext is less about evil than incompetence. Shaw isn’t warning that authority turns saints into villains; he’s mocking the idea that any ordinary person becomes Machiavelli the moment they get a title. The real danger is the fool who mistakes power for permission: to simplify, to punish, to preen, to confuse visibility with legitimacy. Corruption here means degradation - making power stupid, personal, and brittle. It’s a critique of administration as theater: the wrong cast can ruin the role.

Context matters. Shaw wrote through the bureaucratic expansion of the modern state, the churn of party politics, and the moral catastrophe of world wars - eras when “power” grew larger and more technical, demanding competence and restraint. The line also indicts democratic romance: if you treat leadership as a prize rather than a craft, you don’t get corrupted people. You get corrupted power - and everyone has to live inside it.