Corruption Quotes

When rich villains have need of poor ones, poor ones may make what price they will.

William Shakespeare

I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.

Mahatma Gandhi

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

Ernest Hemingway

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president only the second impeachment hearing in American history you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.

Christopher Hitchens

Wherever you see a man who gives someone else's corruption, someone else's prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs us.

John Jay Chapman

The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Cyril Connolly

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious

Kurt Vonnegut

The bad apples are at the top. They enjoy murdering the innocent people.

James Dye

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

Edmund Burke

The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.

Bess Myerson

The mistake you make, don't you see,is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You're trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic system. But one can't. One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing. One can't put things right in a hole-and-corner way, if you take my meaning.

George Orwell

I am against government by crony.

Harold L. Ickes

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

Georges Bernanos

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

Leon Trotsky

It is a fraud to borrow what we are unable to pay.

Publilius Syrus

There is no greater fraud than a promise not kept.

Scottish Proverb

There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by them.

Charles Caleb Colton

I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect -- it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.

Graham Greene