Quotes About Corruption

The highest officers in the government had the strongest motives to corruption, and therefore could by no possibility attempt to check the same corruption in those below them…

On election days, the burdens of poverty and corruption and of a creaky economic system are put aside, and India celebrates. Many voters dress especially for the occasion... None quite voice the thought, but those who came in a steady stream to vote seemed to be saying that India may have fallen far behind its neighbors in the struggle for prosperity, but as long as it can choose its governments, it can hope for better in the future.

The air of innocence remained, still begging corruption.

The emergence of Superpower and its joint imperium of state and corporation have resulted in the institutionalization and normalization of corruption. The doctored accounts, the public misrepresentations, and illegal transactions that have become a commonplace of corporate behavior in recent years have been transmitted to party politics

In both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections Bush's minions employed tactics that revealed a chain of corruption extending from local officials to the highest court, all with the intention of thwarting the popular will.25 The long-run consequences may prove more significant than the clouded elections: a popular distrust of the significance of elections themselves.

Campaign contributions are a vital tool of political management. They create a pecking order that calibrates, in strictly quantitative and objective terms, whose interests have priority.19 The amount of corruption that regularly takes place before elections means that corruption is not an anomaly but an essential element in the functioning of managed democracy.

Near deadlock diminishes the legislature's ability to exercise vigorous oversight of the executive and opens the way for an unprecdented assertion of executive power, especially if a legislature is riddled with corruption.

Lies have short shelf lives. Lies go bad. Lies rot and stink up the joint.

Daimons, vampires, ghouls, whatever you want to call them. They suck your blood and your soul and leave you with nothing. Kind of like lawyers. (Selena)

Love is the greatest corrupter ever known and has been the numbers one downfall of mankind since the first creation.

And if you eat enough of those souls, they begin to corrupt you until you become one of them. Everyone knows that. (Kat) Only if you're stupid. I'm two hundred years old and I haven't turned yet. You just have to learn to hum a lot so you don't hear their bullshit echoing in your head. (Damien)

Because I took an oath to help people. To protect them from The League and any corrupt government. (Devyn) Yeah, and I know people better than to believe that for even an instant. Altruism is dead. People use and they take until you're nothing but a bleeding corpse on the ground at their feet. (Alix)

You believe everything you read in the papers? They get all the facts screwed up, and I think most of them are so crooked, they have to screw their pants on in the morning. Hell, most of them have to go diagonal just to walk in a straight line." – Sundown

You're not expecting, are you? (Jack) No! (Syd) Good, 'cause there's enough radon down there to give a fetus three heads. I don't want to be responsible for none of that. I only believe in corruption the ones what come out of the womb and grow to at least five feet in height. (Jack)

All the vices lead to fortune when they are joined with the vilest of all--avarice. This is the secret of life.

You can take power from others; you can steal it. It is not a very high-grade power. It will give you a certain amount of access to a better life; but it corrupts the individual.

If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.

At some point, don't voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don't they stop saying things like "That's a busted tire floating by" and "That's an old shoe"?

If you talk about corruption, you can talk about a lot of things in life.

In the modern-day world, where time is premium and battle for subsistence is unimaginably tough, the hapless common man simply gives in and pays the bribe just to get on with life.

The guiding principle of my life, 'the means are the ends,' has taught me that our participation in a corrupt system facilitates it and corrupts and therefore defeats us.

American Hustle shows the FBI making real-life bribes to Washington politicians. I know, because as your U.S. senator, I turned them down.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.

The electorate collaborated in its own disenfranchisement. In the public's view, all politicians were corrupt, all civil servants inept, and every government little more than a Mafia plus an army. Once the public had been persuaded to cut the state down to size, the real Mafias took over.