With Great Power

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About

With Great Power also know as “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” is a quote spoken by Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, used in forums to indicate a post that will feature a Spider-Man meme. When not used in direct reference to Spider-man, it can express that a person has so much skill that they only need to demonstrate it in order to win an argument or competition.

The phrase can be used in its whole form, but often the word “responsibility” is swapped out for something that rhymes or completes an alternate joke. It is especially suited for use in image-macro form because of its dual-part construction.

Precursor

The quote “With great power comes great responsibility” is variously attributed to the Oevres de Voltaire, Volume 48 (1829)^[1], Thomas C. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (1827)^[2], and a variety of other sources and other derivations. The first instance of the quote in Spider-Man was Amazing Fantasy #15, August 1962, otherwise known as the first Spider-Man story.

Origin

While the earliest use of the phrase on the internet is unknown, many memes point to either an original Spider-Man reference or a video when in the 2002 version of the film Spider Man, Peter Parker’s uncle Ben speaks the line during a heartfelt scene. This clip was posted to March 10th, 2010.

The first known applications of the phrase to images was with Demotivational Posters. The image on the left is probably circa 2004; The image on the right was created May 16th, 2008.

Spread

Two years after the video clip of Uncle Ben speaking to Peter was posted to YouTube, in August 2011, users began to create image macros, sometimes called “Uncle Ben’s Words of Wisdom” using variations on the phrase over a screen capture from the film.

The phrase and its snowclones spread to images of Spiderman around the same time, including lots of crossover with ’60s Spider-Man.

In addition, the phrase and its variations are commonly used as bait-and-switch forum post titles. There are 129 posts across Reddit^[3] with the exact phrase “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” and thousands of others with variations or substituted words.

On July 24th, 2010, With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story^[4] was released, using the famous phrase to tell the story of Spider-man’s creator.