Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
It is a great mistake to suppose that bribery and corruption, although they may be very convenient for gratifying the ambition or the vanity of individuals, have any great effect upon the fortunes or the power of parties. And it is a great mistake to suppose that bribery and corruption are means by which power can either be ob-tained or retained.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The time has come to tell the truth about the corruption of the government employee unions in this country.
But when you have bad governance, of course, these resources are destroyed: The forests are deforested, there is illegal logging, there is soil erosion. I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship.
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash.
I have absolutely no idea what my generation did to enrich our democracy. We dropped the ball. We entered a period of complacency and closed our eyes to the public corruption of our democracy.
What people fail to appreciate is that the currency of corruption in elective office is, not money, but votes.
Money and corruption are ruining the land, crooked politicians betray the working man, pocketing the profits and treating us like sheep, and we're tired of hearing promises that we know they'll never keep.
True, I used to see a lot of hope. I saw men tear down the veils behind which the truth had been hidden. But then the same men, when they have power in their hands at last, began to find the veils useful. They made many more. Life has not changed. Only some people have been growing, becoming different, that is all. After a youth spent fighting the white man, why should not the president discover as he grows older that his real desire has been to be like the white governor himself, to live above all the blackness in the big old slave castle?
It is not power that corrupts but fear.
The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
Corruption can only prosper with a people's ignore-ance.
No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
The Republicans I've been talking to have said, 'Oh, the public is cynical about indictments, they happen so often.' Well, that's whistling past the graveyard, because the average voter is only going to remember that one of the big Republican head honchos in Congress was indicted. They won't remember the name or position, but they'll remember it says Congress is corrupt and maybe the majority party is corrupt.
In a state where corruption abounds, laws must be very numerous.
It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption.
There is no more important task in Washington than cleaning up the culture of corruption. Yet the president - whose White House has become the cradle of Republican corruption - is not taking responsibility for the costs of that corruption.
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
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.
This is the disease in America. It's not just spending. It's not just taxes. It's not just corruption. It is progressivism. And it is in both Parties. It is in the Republicans and the Democrats.
Big government conservatives are spending trillions and wasting billions. Republicans are no longer the party of fiscal conservancy, but the party of runaway spending and corruption.
The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.
Corruption has its own motivations, and one has to thoroughly study that phenomenon and eliminate the foundations that allow corruption to exist.
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