Quotes About Corruption

Show me a supposedly 'unfixable' problem in Washington, and I'll show you the political corruption standing in the way.

I often ask myself, 'Why is it that most of the lies come out of Islamic countries, and why is it that most of the social corruptions are in the Middle East and in these Islamic countries?' The answer is, when you control something, when you suppress something, people try to do it another way.

Republicans support opening the floodgates to special interest money and suppressing the right to vote. It's just plain wrong.

It's time to review what damage the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has done to our political system.

Citizens United, I believe, will be regarded by history as one of the worst decisions this Supreme Court - or any Supreme Court - has ever made. It is distorting our political process and corrupting our government.

One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.

The major international appeal for 'House of Cards' was kind of a surprise because it's a very American show. What we learned is that American politics is very American, but greed and corruption and all of that is very global.

Our supermarkets sell us horsemeat as beef, our politicians fiddle their expenses, and our bankers risk money that isn't theirs. So it's not surprising the public don't trust anyone or anything.

If a man can be corrupted by a few books, I doubt if there was anything there to begin with.

Was this humanity? Was this nobility? Was this the Christian glory that presumed to hold itself above the heathen Turk? To suffer innocents be sacrificed on an altar of corruption, merely that a lofty family be spared discomfiture? Oh, this was tenfold more abominable than the crime itself, that high authority should wink at it!

There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.

To hell with the rich, they make me sick.

Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment. - on Hollywood

He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.

The trouble with cops is not that they're dumb or crooked or tough, but that they think just being a cop gives them a little something that they didn't have before. Maybe it did once, but not anymore. They're topped by too many smart minds.

The homicide skipper that year was a Captain Gregorius, a type of copper that is getting rarer but by no means extinct, the kind that solves crimes with the bright light, the soft sap, the kick to the kidneys, the knee to the groin, the fist to the solar plexus, the night stick to the base of the spine. Six months later he was indicted for perjury before a grand jury, booted without trial, and later stamped to death by a big stallion on his ranch in Wyoming. Right now I was his raw meat.

We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return.

The law is where you buy it and what you pay for it.

You know what's wrong with this country, baby?...A man can't stay honest if he wants to...he gets chiseled out of his pants if he does. You play the game dirty or you don't eat.

Gano muchísima pasta. Tengo que ganar muchísima pasta para untar a los tipos a los que tengo que untar para ganar muchísima pasta y untar así a los tipos que tengo que untar.

Once outside the law you're all the way outside. You think he's just a gambler. I think he's a pornographer, a blackmailer, a hot car broker, a killer by remote control, and a suborner of crooked cops. He's whatever looks good to him, whatever has the cabbage pinned to it. Don't try to sell me on any high-souled racketeers. They don't come in that pattern.

Do the two girls run around together? I think not. I think they go their separate and slightly divergent roads to perdition. Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless. Carmen is a child who likes to pull wings off flies. Neither of them has any more moral sense than

Sheriff Petersen just went right on getting re-elected, a living testimonial to the fact that you can hold an important public office for ever in our country with no qualifications for it but a clean nose, a photogenic face, and a close mouth. If on top of that you look good on a horse, you are unbeatable.

When a corporation writes something off, it accepts the cost. When we write off corporations as inherently corrupt, we accept the cost, too.