Quotes About Corruption

How frequently do we rush through our day making decision after decision, touching lives in this way or that, with no thought of what corruption has tainted those decisions?

He knew factories. No one had fun in factories. They sweltered and slaved, hunched and harried, people reduced to things, manufacturing so much meaningless plastic shit that made no one happy, poisoned the oceans, corrupted the food chain. The modern world was a burning bus speeding toward a cliff with a maniac at the wheel. And he was not apart, but complicit, a hyperactive child making yuk-yuks in his seat, keeping everyone laughing, distracting them from certain doom.

a national government is bad enough, but this administration is the largest collection of scoundrels and morons in recent memory.

It's rather naive, apart from being ethically objectionable, to assume that our investigators travel around the country with bags of money trying to bribe witnesses to lie on the witness stand. We just don't operate that way.

The Wolf of Wall Street

The corporations don't have to lobby the government anymore. They are the government.

This is a matter of public health. The public was sick and tired of DeLay and his corruption.

The salt of the earth dissolves and the shit remains

I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse.

Get serious. It just ain't all that easy to off someone and get away with it." "We're talking Mexico here, for crying out loud. You know, the country where over sixty thousand people have been murdered by the cartels, and not one person prosecuted? Jeez, it's worse than Chicago." "That's because the prosecutors and judges prefer to live? But we don't have buckets of money like the druggers do. We only have our brains." "Damn.

Weakness begets evil

was greed that broke Wall Street, not the lack of financial algorithms.

We have the best congressmen that money can buy.

For even a little sin in our wellspring has the power to pollute and corrupt the very essence of who we are.

Lethal heat waves, droughts, and runaway wildfires of unprecedented magnitude, check. The scientists warned us. The corporations with vested interests in the fossil fuel industry and the governments they supported acted just like the tobacco companies. They pretended the science was unsettled and stalled for precious years.

In my section,' he says, 'they were all journalists. We used them to start scandals, or break open political cover-ups. We funded them, and we fed them scoops.

Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.

This form of soft dictatorship does not require mass violence to stay in power. Instead, it relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies. These modern-day clercs understand their role, which is to defend the leaders, however dishonest their statements, however great their corruption, and however disastrous their impact on ordinary people and institutions. In exchange, they know that they will be rewarded and advanced.

This way of speaking—"Putin is a killer, but so are we all"—mirrors Putin's own propaganda, which often states, in so many words, "Okay, Russia is corrupt, but so is everyone else.

Though the looting fever eventually subsided in Poland and elsewhere, it may well have helped build tolerance for the corruption and theft of public property that were so common later on.

Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia's citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become today's northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running. Tragically

I am talking about evil. It blooms. It eats. It grins.

In 2012, corruption even by official statistics was eating up one-third of the state budget.

She regrets the breakup of the Soviet Union and blames Western-imported corruption