Confirmed. Acton wrote it in a private letter of 5 April 1887 to Bishop Mandell Creighton, arguing that popes and kings should be judged by the same moral rule as everyone else. The line was first put into print in his posthumous Historical Essays and Studies (1907), and the wording matches the manuscript transcriptions exactly.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” — Lord Acton (John Dalberg-Acton), letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 5 April 1887
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Provenance
The 1887 letter to Bishop Creighton
Source
Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton
Date written
5 April 1887
First collected
Historical Essays and Studies (1907)
Author
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. … Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.
Acton’s manuscript reads ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ — without a comma. The familiar comma after ‘corrupt’ is an editorial convention added by later reprints; the meaning is unchanged.
The full sentence — ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men’ — is transcribed verbatim from the letter in Hanover College’s course excerpts ↗.
The idea, though, is older: Phrases.org.uk ↗ traces near-versions back to William Pitt the Elder (1770) and Lamartine (1848).
✓Public domain
Acton wrote the line in 1887 and it was first printed in Historical Essays and Studies (London: Macmillan) in 1907. Both the composition and first publication fall well before 1931, and Acton died in 1902, so the text is in the public domain in the United States.
Fact-check
What people get wrong
This one is genuinely Acton’s — but two things travel with it: a slightly garbled wording, and the myth that he invented the thought out of nothing.
✕
the conceptThe idea — older than Acton predates him
William Pitt the Elder told the Lords in 1770 that ‘unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it,’ and Lamartine wrote in 1848 that ‘absolute power corrupts the best natures’ phrases.org.uk ↗. Acton coined the memorable phrasing, not the underlying idea.
✕
the exact wordsThe wording — often trimmed mis-quoted
It is frequently shortened to ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ dropping Acton’s ‘tends to.’ His letter actually reads ‘Power tends to corrupt’ Hanover ↗, and the qualifier matters: he meant corruption is a tendency, not an inevitability.
✓The exact sentence is Lord Acton’s, written to Bishop Mandell Creighton on 5 April 1887 Wikiquote ↗ — the ‘tends to’ is just the part most people leave out.
Context
Why he wrote it
Acton was not making a general remark about politicians; he was in a scholarly quarrel about how historians should treat the powerful. He had reviewed Bishop Mandell Creighton’s History of the Papacy and objected that Creighton judged popes and kings too gently — excusing the Inquisition and religious persecution as products of their age.
In reply, Acton insisted on a single moral yardstick: ‘I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men.’ If anything, he argued, the presumption should run against the holders of power — and it is there, mid-argument, that the famous sentence lands.
If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases.
More on the Acton–Creighton dispute
Creighton, himself a churchman and the editor who had commissioned Acton’s review, printed the criticism but privately pushed back. Their exchange became one of the most cited discussions of moral judgment in the writing of history.
Acton followed the famous line with a warning about deference to office: ‘There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.’
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1834–1902 · English historian, moralist & Liberal politician
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902), was an English Catholic historian and Liberal politician renowned for his encyclopaedic command of European history and his insistence that rulers be judged by the same moral standard as everyone else. He planned a monumental “History of Liberty” that he never wrote, and became Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895. Today he is remembered chiefly for this single sentence.
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Cite this
Primary source — Chicago
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, Baron Acton to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 5 April 1887; first collected in Historical Essays and Studies (London: Macmillan, 1907).
MLA (9th ed.)
Acton, Lord. Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 5 April 1887. Historical Essays and Studies, Macmillan, 1907.
APA (7th ed.)
Acton, Lord. (1907). Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 5 April 1887. In Historical essays and studies. Macmillan. (Original work written 1887)
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’?” Last verified 10 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/power-tends-to-corrupt-and-absolute-power-corrupts