Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Abbey

Abbey’s line reads like a warning label slapped on the machinery of government: not “power can be abused,” but power is structurally toxic. The first sentence is blunt, almost dull on purpose. “Always” refuses the comforting fantasy that we can finally build the benign institution, elect the pure candidate, design the fail-safe system. Then the second sentence sharpens into a two-pronged indictment. Power “attracts the worst” because it offers what the worst want: leverage without intimacy, control without consent, outcomes without accountability. It’s a magnet for people who treat public life as a hunting ground.

The nastier twist is “and corrupts the best.” Abbey isn’t letting idealists off the hook; he’s attacking the myth of moral immunity. The subtext is that power doesn’t merely reveal character, it edits it. It rewards compromise, normalizes small coercions, converts urgency into entitlement. Even principled actors begin to think the ends they desire justify the means they now command, and the means leave residue.

Coming from Abbey, the desert anarchist with a novelist’s taste for provocation, the intent isn’t neutral political theory; it’s anti-romance. He’s puncturing the American habit of treating authority as a stage for virtue. Context matters: a 20th-century writer watching the security state expand, corporations entangle with government, and environmental policy get managed by the very extractive interests it was supposed to restrain. The quote works because it offers no hero, only a system-level suspicion: if you want less corruption, don’t just “elect better people.” Reduce the dose.