The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.
The many are more incorruptible than the few; they are like the greater quantity of water which is less easily corrupted than a little.
If you vote and you elect dishonest, incompetent people into office who screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You caused the problem; you voted them in; you have no right to complain.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt. And a citizen who barters with such a state shares in its corruption and lawlessness.
I would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating.
Politicians promise you heaven before an election and give you hell after.
Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.
When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
A person should not be too honest. Straight trees are cut first and honest people are screwed first.
Greed is permanent slavery.
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
Corruption is a cancer that steals from the poor, eats away at governance and moral fibre and destroys trust.