Quotes About Corruption

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

Every man has his price, or a guy like me couldn't exist.

It is a matter of common knowledge that the government of South Carolina is under domination of a small ring of cunning, conniving men.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.

If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle

You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.

In all cities, the better classes - the business men - are the sources of corruption, but they are so rarely pursued and caught that we do not fully realize whence the trouble comes.

So easily do weak men put in high positions turn villains.

Democracy virtually assures that only bad and dangerous men will ever rise to the top of government.

No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community.

The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

Even great men can be corrupted

The downfall of every civilization comes, not from the moral corruption of the common man, but rather from the moral complacency of common men in high places.

I spent thirty-three years in the Marines, most of my time being a hlgh class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

Bad men cannot make good citizens. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience are incompatible with freedom.

Anyone who'd sell out a whole town wouldn't hesitate to double-cross one man.

All middle men are bad.

It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man's interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.

I believe in Spiritualism; I advocate free love in the highest, purest sense, as the only cure for the damnation by which men corrupt God's most holy institution of sexual relations.

Herein is not only a great vanity, but a great contempt of God's good gifts, that the sweetness of man's breath, being a good gift of God, should be willfully corrupted by this stinking smoke.

Corrupt men are always liars. Lies are their instruments, their pleasure, their solace. In time they come to believe their lies, or rather to half-believe them.

Riches are a cause of evil, not because, of themselves, they do any evil, but because they goad men on to evil.

Everywhere do I percieve a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their own advantage underthat name and pretext of commonwealth.