Quotes About Corruption

He also embraced a cyclical theory of history. History, he believed, flowed in cycles. Infant nations were virtuous and uncorrupted, but with age they grew tainted, eventually falling into decline and succumbing to their encumbering maladies and vices.

A fox may steal your hens, Sir, a whore your health and pence, Sir, your daughter rob your chest, Sir, your wife may steal your rest, Sir, a thief your goods and plate. But this is all but picking, with rest, pence, chest and chicken; it ever was decreed, Sir, if lawyer's hand is feed, Sir, he steals your whole estate.

Through all the employments of life each neighbor abuses his brother; whore and rogue they call husband and wife: All professions be-rogue one another.

He's a two-faced, cutthroat, dirt-dumb, chicken shit, slimy, little bastard with a bright future in politics.

Huntly was also taken, but died of a stroke while still mounted on his horse. His corpse was embalmed and sent to Edinburgh, where it was kept until the following May, when it was put on trial in Parliament. As the clerk's report put it, "The coffin was set upright, as if the earl stood on his feet." He was then found guilty of treason, and the family estates were declared forfeit.

Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion, or corruption of that which has substance.

The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practice politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.

No se precisa un diploma en la pared para acreditar que se es perverso.

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

Bonham walked down the line with a stack of sixpences and passed them out like a priest of mammon at unholy communion. Hands flashed like the tongues of lizards, deftly trousering the loot.

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.

Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them … with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind, that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society, and that general fairness that cements mankind.

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.

however, be good if we are induced to come down from the English pedestal in Europe of incessant self-glorification, and learn that our close, stifling, corrupt system gives no air nor scope for healthy and effective organisation anywhere. We are oligarchic in all things, from our parliament to our army. Individual interests are admitted as obstacles to the general prosperity. This plague runs through all things with us.

Sanchez has always heard he's a good cop, maybe even a decent man. The latter's more common than the former; power breeds abuse.

Wrack and waste, the Kleptocracy actually did it.

Do not believe in angels, Rien Conn, for they are all corrupted by the lies of the Builders, as your forebears were corrupted, too.

Even in the heart of the empire, corruption spreads.

Not every wealthy man might choose a public life, but anyone who chose public life must be a wealthy man. Corruption, coercion and predation ensured the determined could acquire fortunes. Augustus, while still a teenager, had amassed enough money to support a private army. Ambitious men gathered the support of peers and bestowed patronage on numerous clients. Patronage, indeed, was at the heart of the whole system.

Political life was defined by money. Having it, taking it and giving it were the principal concerns of the powerful. It was not just a matter of lavish expenditure on public shows or comfortable living in the innumerable houses that one man might possess; set amounts of capital were required for a man to become an equestrian – a knight – or a senator.

destruction. Peru's President Castañeda

Once a free people have reached this point, Machiavelli concluded, there is no hope left. Their empire may expand, as Rome's did under the emperors. The wealth can continue to pour in. The arts may flourish; the political factionalism makes for dramatic entertainment, while people ignore the underlying rot. But such a society is doomed, unless a major crisis forces a change in its thinking.

By the time of the Great Schism, Italy had descended back into gangster politics, as in the days of Caesar and Pompey.

For example, Socrates explains that the dissolute freedom of democracies like that of Athens, "which treats all men as equals whether they are equal or not," must lead inevitably to moral corruption, civic disorder, and mob rule.