“Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.”

This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.

There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us.

Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.

Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.

If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?

Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.

Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.

It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.

Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.

Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.

The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!

Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Great men are almost always bad men.

How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!

My final comment is that I still believe this man [John D. Rockefeller] is corrupt and he used unfair ways to become wealthy, all he cared about was his money and wasn’t considered.

Nick plays a corrupt politician, which is kind of a redundant statement.

I decided to write the book to open the eyes of the people of how corrupt John D. Rockefeller company was and the unfair ways he used to be successful.