Genuine. Chatham spoke the words in the House of Lords on 9 January 1770, closing his speech in the debate over the Commons’ treatment of John Wilkes and the Middlesex election. The line survives verbatim in the 1848 collected Speeches of the Earl of Chatham ↗: “Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where law ends, there tyranny begins.”
“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it” — William Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham, speech in the House of Lords, 9 January 1770
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Provenance
The source
Speaker
William Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham
Occasion
Speech in the House of Lords, 9 January 1770 — the debate on the Address, arising from the Wilkes / Middlesex-election crisis
Printed in
The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons (London, 1848), pp. 93–95
Peroration
“where law ends, there tyranny begins” — echoing John Locke’s Second Treatise (1689)
I willingly acquit the present House of Commons of having actually formed so detestable a design; but they cannot themselves foresee to what excesses they may be carried hereafter; and, for my own part, I should be sorry to trust to their future moderation. Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where law ends, there tyranny begins.
Chatham’s closing warning against the Commons arrogating an unchecked power to itself over elections. Popular quotation usually keeps only the first clause and drops “there” from the second.
Confirmed verbatim in the 1848 collected Speeches of the Earl of Chatham ↗, in the speech of 9 January 1770; the amendment was then defeated 203 to 36.
Wikiquote ↗ lists the line as sourced, citing the same 9 January 1770 Lords speech and the 1848 edition.
Phrases.org.uk ↗ cites Pitt’s 1770 line as an early expression of the idea Lord Acton later crystallised as “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
✓Public domain
The words were spoken in 1770 and the collected Speeches cited here were published in 1848 — both long in the public domain in the United States (anything published before 1931). No modern translation is involved; the text is Chatham’s own English as reported by his 18th- and 19th-century editors.
Fact-check
What people get wrong
The attribution to Chatham is sound, but the line travels with two persistent confusions.
✕
conflated withLord Acton different author
The catch-all “power corrupts” maxim — “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” — is Lord Acton’s ↗, from an 1887 letter, more than a century after Chatham. Chatham’s sentence is a distinct, earlier statement of the same theme, not the Acton line.
✕
the second clauseJohn Locke
The closing “where law ends, tyranny begins” is Chatham consciously echoing John Locke ↗, Second Treatise of Government (1689), §202: “Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins.” That half is sometimes re-credited wholesale to Locke.
✕
misquoteCondensed “possessor” variant reworded
A shortened form — “Unlimited power corrupts the possessor…” — circulates on quote sites. The documented wording in the collected Speeches ↗ is the fuller “apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.”
✓The words are genuinely Chatham’s, spoken in the Lords on 9 January 1770 and printed in his collected Speeches ↗ — an original thought that pairs Locke’s idea of law with a warning that predates Acton’s more famous formula.
Context
Why it was said
By January 1770 the Commons had repeatedly refused to seat John Wilkes despite his re-election for Middlesex, seating his defeated opponent instead. Chatham, newly returned to the Lords after illness, framed this as the Commons seizing a power it had no right to — the sitting House deciding for itself who the electors could choose.
His warning was structural, not personal: a body with unchecked power over its own membership could not be trusted to stay moderate, because “unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.” The amendment he backed was voted down 203 to 36.
Where law ends, there tyranny begins.
The Wilkes crisis in one paragraph
John Wilkes, expelled from the Commons over the libel case around The North Briton No. 45 and an obscene poem, was returned again and again by Middlesex voters. The Commons’ refusal to seat him — declaring his defeated rival elected — became a national cause about representation and the limits of parliamentary power, the setting for Chatham’s speech.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1708–1778 · British statesman & orator, twice effective head of government
William Pitt the Elder was the dominant British war minister of the Seven Years’ War and, as Earl of Chatham, a towering parliamentary orator. His reputation rested on defence of constitutional liberty and suspicion of arbitrary power — the exact register of this 1770 warning. Few verbatim transcripts of his speeches survive, but the great perorations were recorded closely enough to enter the record.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source — Chicago
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Speech in the House of Lords, 9 January 1770. In The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons. London: Aylott & Jones, 1848, pp. 93–95.
MLA (9th ed.)
Pitt, William, Earl of Chatham. “Speech in the House of Lords, 9 January 1770.” The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons, Aylott & Jones, 1848, pp. 93–95.
APA (7th ed.)
Pitt, W. (1848). Speech in the House of Lords, January 9, 1770. In The speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons (pp. 93–95). Aylott & Jones. (Original speech delivered 1770)
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it’?” Last verified 10 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/unlimited-power-is-apt-to-corrupt-the-minds-of-those-who