Quotes About Corruption

I knew President Yeltsin well. He would never have tolerated government officials demonstratively showing off the millions they acquired through corruption, the way it's done today.

Was I involved in selling drivers licenses to people illegally? Hell no I wasn't. Would I have tolerated it? Hell no.

Corruption has been tolerated for too long now, and with Buhari, we will, for the first time ever, have a president who will fight corruption. He will act so that people will be deterred from corruption.

it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules. Most of the members of that class run their operations and live their lives in ways that injure our communities. Most are trying to rig the system even further. These are not upstanding citizens. They are parasites and freeloaders—however they try to justify themselves. We do not owe them deference.

Every kleptocratic network I have examined, from Afghanistan to Honduras to Central Asian or African countries, has included a skein of outright

So does the fact that corrupt officials the world over buy art, often anonymously, as a way to launder money. The uber-rich use it to dodge taxes. Warehouses in Geneva and New York are stacked with specially conditioned safes. There, great works are reduced to the equivalent of zeroes in anonymous bank accounts.

Systemic corruption, leaving no means of redress or civic appeal, drives citizens to extremes.

divides over cultural and identity-group issues often mask—in fact may be deliberately used to mask—unanimity at the top of the system when it comes to condoning or participating in corruption.

In the United States, serious and damaging public corruption is not getting punished. That means, by default, that we deem it to be just fine.

the history of the Gilded Age delivers one certainty, it is this: there is no way to access infinite wealth without rigging the system. No one becomes a billionaire honestly.

But leading lights of the Democratic Party and the businesses affiliated with them quickly embraced the new plutocratic ethos.

Don't you know?" the two elders shot back, almost together. "Olokun gives money to people he hates. It destroys them.

Trump has taken mafia government to heights unrivaled in this country's history. His swiftness to trade U.S. policy concessions for personal advancement will be the most shameful legacy of his presidency.

Members of today's kleptocratic networks who incorporate companies under fictitious or borrowed names are using a modern screening allegory on law enforcement and the public. Only initiates learn where the money comes from, how much there really is, and how much is being stolen from fellow citizens in the form of unpaid taxes. One entity has been particularly effective in its use of secrecy: the Koch network.

Like a drug, money can make its addicts betray almost anyone.

For example, executives and HR departments should not offer the vice president of Enron a string of government jobs in the public-private international development and infrastructure industries after his company's debacle.

A ratchet-up would be to expel violators like him from powerful jobs they currently hold if the wrongdoing continues or their contracts come up for renewal. The next notch would be to take their freedom—that is, to investigate, prosecute, and send them to jail. That option terrifies the dominator coalition. Why else would it have worked so hard for thirty years to eliminate it?

Militant political religion as the only alternative to corruption. That was just the nexus I had seen in the Taliban's appeal in Afghanistan, and in the frequent presence of extremist insurgencies in other acutely corrupt countries. Public integrity, the proposition seemed to be, could only emerge through the rigid purity of religious practice—imposed by law if need be, or savage violence.

I do not think money is the root of all evil, but I know it makes an effective fertilizer.

She was like milk - too pale, too pure, too simple. She was made to be spoiled.

Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed he who fears corruption fears life.

There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.

Whenever the word power is mentioned, somebody sooner or later will refer to the classical statement of Lord Acton and cite it as follows: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." In fact the correct quotation is: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." We can't even read Acton's statement accurately, our minds are so confused by our conditioning.

We need a generation of dissident disciples who confront and resist corruption and systemic abuses in whatever locations they are found: • corruption in the countries of the world, • our churches' complicities in these corruptions, • and the reading of Revelation as speculation, which blunts our prophetic voice.