Quotes About Corruption

Usually it is said that periodic droughts cause bad crops and therefore starvation. But it is the elites of starving countries that propagate this idea. It is a false idea. The unjust or mistaken allocation of funds and national property is the most frequent source of hunger. There was a lot of grain in Ethiopia, but it had first been hidden by the rich and then thrown on the market at a doubled price, inaccessible to peasants and the poor.

Reflection is not the evil; but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement.

In The Knights Aristophanes gave us a picture of the final state of corruption in which the vulgar rabble ends when--just as in Tibet they worship the Dalai Lama's excrement--they contemplate their own scum in its representatives; and that, in a democracy, is a degree of corruption comparable to auctioning the crown in a monarchy.

In the nature of things a priesthood is always demoralizing.

Habiby has been able to see man in unheroic positions. If the core of the tragic world is a moral order corrupted by evil, then the world depicted in this novel is a closed one where two evils have met and where heroism has been born out of the havoc that resulted from their meeting (In her introduction to Habiby's Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist)

Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpot… I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied that I— even I—had dreamed.

The system is corrupt, a young man on a bicycle shouted, and if it cannot be changed it must be destroyed. The mastodon revolution is here and you must all choose which side of history you want to be on.

When Don Anastasio Somoza fled the country, he took with him everything he could carry, including all the cash in the national treasury. He even had the bodies of Tacho I and Luis Somoza dug up and they, too, went into exile. No doubt he would have taken the land as well, if he'd known how.

And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings –– by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.

Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots … I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I—even I—had dreamed.

But the city in its corruption refused to submit to the dominion of the cartographers

La mayor parte de las formas de degradación personal y maldad pública se desencadenan y sustentan con la mentira. Los actos de adulterio y demás deslealtades personales, el fraude económico, la corrupción gubernamental... hasta el asesinato y el genocidio suelen requerir un defecto moral adicional: la disposición para mentir.

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

O money, money, how blindly thou hast been worshipped, and how stupidly abused! Thou are health and liberty and strength, and he that has thee may rattle his pockets at the foul fiend!

It is precisely when we help one another that we gain our victories over corruption, but the victory is assured only when we help one another with all our strength.

Success Corrupts and Limits Potential as Soon as You Start to Think You Could Do It Alone.

We are taught to want a thing. We are taught that having that thing will make us happy. We are taught that having it immediately is the answer. We are taught a corrupted version of success. And love.

Just because you've reached a certain level of success, that doesn't mean you've become corrupted by the system.

Success can corrupt; usefulness can only exalt.

Nowadays nothing but money counts: a fortune brings honors, friendships, the poor man everywhere lies low.

If success corrupts, I'm probably pretty corrupted by now.

Of course,' the inspector remarked, with the naïvety of the corrupt, 'if he had really been rich, he would not be in prison.

In any case, even the most corrupt of us finds it hard to believe in evil unless it is based on some interest. We reject the idea of harm done for no cause and without gain as anomalous.

This woman only became a criminal because she touched me. I am oozing with crime. She caught it off me as one may catch typhus, or cholera, or the plague!