CORRUPTION

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." - Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Col. William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864 * * * "The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind....We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they promise us any substantial reform.....They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires." - From the preamble to the platform of the People's Party (1892) * * * "The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836) * * * "Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country." - Karl Kraus, Morality and Criminal Justice (1908) * * * "The hydra of corruption is only scotched, not dead. An investigation kills and it and its supporters dead. Let this be had." - Andrew Jackson, letter to James K. Polk, December 16, 1832 * * * "The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered." - Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) * * * "Were it not for the corruption and viciousness of degenerate men, there would be no ... necessity that men should separate from this great and natural community, and by positive agreements combine into smaller and divided associations." - John Locke, Two Treatises of Government * * * "The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means." - Georges Bernanos, "Why Freedom?" The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos (1955) * * * "The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference." - Claire Safran, "Impeachment?" Redbook, April 1974 * * * "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, Practical Agitation (1898) * * * "Blest paper-credit! last and best supply! That lends corruption lighter wings to fly!" - Alexander Pope, Epistle to Bathurst * * * "'Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. Bribery and corruption are common. Children no longer obey their parents. . . . The end of the world is evidently approaching.' Sound familiar? It is, in fact, the lament of a scribe in one of the earliest inscriptions to be unearthed in Mesopotamia, where Western civilization was born." - John Sommerville, The Rise and Fall of Childhood (1990) * * * "No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power." - Jacob Bronowski, Encounter (London, July 1971) * * * "The phenomenon of corruption is like the garbage. It has to be removed daily." - Ignacio Pichardo Pagaza, NY Times, April 17, 1987 * * * "As people get their opinions so largely from the newspapers they read, the corruption of the schools would not matter so much if the Press were free. But the Press is not free. As it costs at least a quarter of a million of money to establish a daily newspaper in London, the newspapers are owned by rich men. And they depend on the advertisements of other rich men. Editors and journalists who express opinions in print that are opposed to the interests of the rich are dismissed and replaced by subservient ones." - George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism (1949) * * * "The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry." - George Berkeley, Alciphron, in "Alciphron: or the Minute Philosopher", The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (1948-1957) * * * "The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage; and this when used with calmness and deliberation will prove strong enough." - Andrew Jackson, Letter to James Buchanan, June 25, 1825 * * * "Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both." - John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Speech to NATO, July 3, 1963 * * * "Union of Religious Sentiments begets a surprising confidence and Ecclesiastical Establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the Execution of Mischievous Projects." - James Madison, Letter to William Bradford, January 24, 1794 * * * "Luxury, or a refinement on the pleasures and conveniences of life, had long been supposed the source of every corruption in government, and the immediate cause of faction, sedition, civil wars, and the total loss of liberty. It was, therefore, universally regarded as a vice, and was an object of declamation to all satyrists, and severe moralists." - David Hume, "An Enquiry Concerning the Principals of Morals" * * * "I weep for the liberty of my country when I see at this early day of its 'successful experiment' that corruption has been imputed to many members of the House of Representatives, and the rights of the people have been bartered for promises of office." - Andrew Jackson, Letter to John Coffee, February 10, 1825 * * * "Ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments." - French National Assembly, Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed August 1789, published September 1791) * * * "In all institutions where the brisk air of public criticism fails to circulate (as, for example, in scholarly bodies and senates), an innocent corruption grows up, like a mushroom." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, "A Glance at the State," aphorism 468, "Innocent Corruption" (1878) * * * "I am ... willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them—the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings." - Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) * * * "Principles aren’t of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season." - Mark Twain, Speech, January 4, 1901 "Municipal Corruption" * * * "Among the best traitors Ireland has ever had, Mother Church ranks at the very top, a massive obstacle in the path to equality and freedom. She has been a force for conservatism, not on the basis of preserving Catholic doctrine or preventing the corruption of her children, but simply to ward off threats to her own security and influence." - Bernadette Devlin, The Price of My Soul (1969) * * * "Trusting as we did to the virtue of the people, the real people, not the politicians and demagogues, we passed through the most responsible and trying scenes, sustained by the bone and sinew of the nation, the laborers of the land, where alone, in these days of Bank rule, and ragocrat corruption, real virtue and love of liberty is to be found." - Andrew Jackson, Letter to Francis P. Blair, January 29, 1839 * * * "'Make love, not war,' was not just a protest against the indifference and lack of humaneness in Vietnam; it was also a positive statement that love between parent and child, teacher and pupil, fiancé and fiancée, and husband and wife is an activity we should try to pursue in the house when work is not necessary. It is the one real source of truth, beauty, and salvation in a community where deceit, corruption, and impersonality seem to be rampant." - Jerome Kagan, In Support of Families (1986) * * * "In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don’t have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all." - Denis Diderot, Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws (1921) * * * "When they call roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer 'present' or 'not guilty.'" - Teddy Roosevelt * * * "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." - Henry Kissinger * * * "I have always thought, from my earliest youth 'til now, that the greatest scourge an angry Heaven ever inflicted upon an ungrateful and a sinning people was an ignorant, a corrupt, or a dependent judiciary." - Chief Justice John Marshall * * * "We have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks... They are not government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers..." - Senator Louis T. McFadden (for 22 years Chairman of the U.S. Banking and Currency Commission) * * * "I think one of the by-products of the communications explosion is a sort of 'corruption fatigue.' We've lost our ability to be shocked or enraged by the machinations of politicians. We've been battered with such frequency that we've become indifferent. We're punch drunk with scandal." - Larry Gelbart * * * "The big thieves hang the little ones." - Czech Proverb * * * "... U.S. intelligence officers working for the CIA and other agencies have fattened their wallets by moonlighting for the private apparats. The practice is a dangerous one, dividing the officer's loyalties and often bringing them into direct conflict with their own agencies' goals. In one case, agents of the Drug Enforcement Adminstration (DEA) were hired to debug secretly the home of a criminal under investigation by the DEA for smuggling heroin; in another case, a CIA officer assisted a large aircraft firm in evading an embargo imposed by the United States, thereby enabling the firm to obtain a multimillion-dollar contract paid for by the People's Republic of China." - Jim Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America - The Private Use of Secret Agents, 1978 * * * "The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and priviledge controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day." - Theodore Roosevelt * * * "... [T]here today exists uncontrolled in the hands of a set of men a power to make dollars from nothing." - Thomas W. Lawson Frenzied Finance, 1905 * * * "We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine on the bench [judges]... The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced... and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for self-protection; imported pauperized labor beats down their wages; a hirely army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down..." - Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar's Column, 1892 * * * "Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt." - Graham Greene, The Human Factor, 1878 * * * "There is nothing more agreeable in this life than to make peace with the Establishment - and nothing more corrupting." - A.J.P. Taylor, New Statesman, 1953 * * * "Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse." - Adlai Stevenson, speech, September 12, 1952 * * * "Government is more than the sum of all the interests; it is the paramount interest, the public interest. It must be the efficient, effective agent of a responsible citizenry, not the shelter of the incompetent and the corrupt." - Adlai Stevenson, speech, 1948 * * * "The more corrupt the State the more numerous the laws." - Cornelius Tacitus, Annals, 2nd c. * * * "The taking of a bribe or gratuity should be punished with as severe penalties as the defrauding of the State." - William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693 * * * "We do many things at the federal level that would be considered dishonest and illegal if done in the private sector." - Donald T. Regan, in New York Times, August 25, 1986 * * * "A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation." - Howard Scott, The New Dictionary of Thought, 1957 * * * The germ of the theory appears in Kefauver's book based on the hearings, Crime in America (1951). With minor variants the story has since developed: Underworld characters with local political protection are acquiring legally established businesses as "fronts" and are snatching working control in various large corporations - especially in hotels and hotel chains, motels and motel chains, in divers pleasure resorts and perhaps in banks. Such characters, it is held, have made a bundle in the underworld - through gambling operations, houses of prostitution, bootlegging, assassination, smuggling, the narcotics traffic - and they are now pyramiding their illicit gains in the labyrinthine corporate world. Various dangers loom: They will loot companies from the inside, they will rig markets and defraud the public, they will be better able to procure politicians, they will prey on "legitimate" businessmen. They will turn a happy, honest corporate world into a devil's den, with consequent demoralization of an orderly society. They will, in short, act like fairly typical businessmen. - Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich, 1968 * * * "Taking somebody's money without permission is stealing, unless you work for the IRS; then it's taxation. Killing people en masse is homicidal mania, unless you work for the Army; then it's National Defense. Spying on your neighbors is invasion of privacy, unless you work for the FBI; then it's National Security. Running a whorehouse makes you a pimp and poisoning people makes you a murderer, unless you work for the CIA; then it's counter-intelligence." – Robert Anton Wilson * * *