Did Donny Osmond say this quote: If a person loves power more than people, they don’t deserve it.
Executive summary
A review of the supplied reporting finds no credible source among the provided material that attributes the sentence "If a person loves power more than people, they don’t deserve it." to Donny Osmond; major quote repositories and profiles of Osmond in the package show many attributed lines but not that one [1] [2] [3] [4]. That absence does not prove he never said it at some point, but based on the supplied evidence the attribution is unverified and likely a misattribution or anonymous aphorism repackaged and circulated as a celebrity quote [5] [6].
1. Catalogues of Donny Osmond’s remarks do not contain the line
The mainstream quote collections and aggregators included in the reporting — BrainyQuote, Top 10/Top 35 quote lists, QuoteFancy and similar compilations — present multiple well-documented Donny Osmond lines about being an entertainer, religion, and authenticity, yet none of the entries in those sources reproduce the specific “loves power more than people” sentence [1] [2] [3] [7]. That negative finding is important because those databases specialize in collecting short, shareable epigrams tied to public figures; the target phrase does not appear in the snippets provided from those pages [1] [2].
2. Biographical and interview coverage likewise lacks the phrase
Profiles and interviews included in the reporting — a Wikipedia biographical entry and feature pieces in Parade and PEOPLE that quote Osmond reflecting on career, family and television — document his public statements about career choices and personal values but do not contain or attribute the contested aphorism [4] [8] [9]. Those longer-form sources tend to reproduce verbatim remarks from interviews and autobiographical passages; their silence on this specific sentence is further evidence that the line is not part of the commonly cited Osmond corpus in this packet [8] [9].
3. The phrase reads like a general aphorism that is often misattributed
The formulation “If a person loves power more than people, they don’t deserve it” resembles a class of moral maxims that circulate widely on social media and in quote collections, and such pithy moral lines are frequently misattributed to well-known public figures to increase shareability; the supplied reporting includes instances where paraphrases and assorted aphorisms are ascribed to Osmond by secondary sites but without primary sourcing [5] [6] [10]. Given that the quoted databases in the collection contain many genuine Osmond lines but not this one, a plausible explanation is that the sentence is an unattributed proverb that has migrated into internet quote lists and been mislabeled, though the supplied material does not trace an origin.
4. Verdict, caveats, and what the sources do and do not show
Verdict: based on the supplied reporting, there is no documented evidence here that Donny Osmond said “If a person loves power more than people, they don’t deserve it” and the attribution is unverified [1] [2] [3] [4]. Caveats: absence from these particular sources is not definitive proof that Osmond never uttered the line in an undocumented setting; the present packet lacks primary interviews, archival transcripts, or a direct citation tying him to that exact sentence, so a more exhaustive search (archived interviews, books, video transcripts, or a primary-source database) would be required to reach absolute certainty [8] [9]. Readers should treat the current attribution as unconfirmed and watch for the quote appearing without sourcing, which is a common pattern for misattributed aphorisms online [5] [6].