Quotes About Corruption

The dictator has to keep the economy functioning in order to keep stealing from it.

Fight scarcity power and corruption; correct externalities; try to maximise information; get the incentives right; engage with other countries; and most of all embrace markets, which do most of these jobs at the same time.

For as the poets and the warriors fell by the wayside the bureaucrats took over.

Dealing with police and politics were the pivotal props of the system...

Americans accept that gangsters are running the government.

Firtash was the Ukrainian middleman for Gazprom, the Russian state-run natural gas giant. Putin used the company as an instrument of statecraft and an engine of corruption. Firtash bought gas from Gazprom at a steep discount. He marked it up threefold when he sold it to Ukraine, pocketing $3 billion and paying pro-Russian politicians, chiefly Yanukovych, to do the Kremlin's bidding. Through the oligarch's largesse, the president paid Manafort his millions.

What should have been shattering news—a Klansman dictating orders to elected officials and leaders of the dominant political party—barely caused a stir.

In Muncie, the "Constitution had ceased to function," wrote the Chicago Tribune, after the Klan had established a "super-government" not based on the rule of law.

The house was thick with politicians and thick with Klansmen, one and the same.

He told her he "controlled every court in Indiana." For $30, he could get someone to sign an affidavit to anything he dictated, he boasted. For $50, he could get a man killed.

To avoid trouble, one large manufacturing company made membership in the Ku Klux Klan a qualification for employment

Fully half the town of 30,000 belonged to the Klan, including mayor, prosecutor, police force, and school board.

And here was yet another plum: Ed Jackson, the Republican whose name had first appeared on membership rolls of the Klan in 1923, had been swept into the governor's office. He owed it all to D. C. Stephenson.

he showed no outward fear of getting caught; law enforcement couldn't touch him. And because the Klan had made him rich, money further immunized him from justice.

D. C. Stephenson was telling the state's top elected officials what to do. And they followed the Klansman's every order.

At least fifty people were taken down to the Trinity River bottoms in Dallas for whippings and acid brandings. Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known and even encouraged within the blue wall, for a majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order. Proof of Malcolm X's later observation that the Klan had 'changed its bedsheets for a policeman's uniform

He referred to Pope Paul III as "His Hellishness." Were not the pope and his associates at least members of the church? Yes, as much as spit, snot, pus, feces, urine, stench, scab, smallpox, ulcers, and syphilis are members of the body. Luther was never one to mince words.

Criminals/sinners-from the Black Panthers to FBI chiefs and White House Officials-appear on the scene, make their play, and get dragged off stage, but the lawyers remain, administrating and profiting from the action and booking the next show.

In retrospect, these events are discouraging: too many scientists seem to have been in the service of money and power. Too many in the media saw it as their duty to be "neutral" by uncritically reporting every theory, rather than investigating who sponsored them and whether they were backed by solid evidence. Too many government officials seem to have been willing to sacrifice poor fisherfolk on the altar of high growth.

Some believed that Satan had come to earth in human form as a party activist, his collective farm register a book of hell, promising torment and damnation.

Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well.

The Russian oligarchy established after the 1990 elections continues to function, and promotes a foreign policy designed to destroy democracy elsewhere.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.