Corruption Quotes - Page 23

• Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)

  Robert Penn Warren

  Kings, Men, Sin

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.235, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn’t as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness

  Gregory Maguire

  Grief, Dirty, Character

  Gregory Maguire (2009). “A Lion Among Men: Volume Three in The Wicked Years”, p.8, Harper Collins

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• The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson...

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Freedom, Real, World Government

  "F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1928-1945" edited by Elliott Roosevelt, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, (p. 373), 1950.

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• All Earthquakes and Disasters are warnings; there’s too much corruption in the world

  Aristotle

  Earthquakes, Warning, World

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• What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days--and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins--impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity--cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt.

  Graham Greene

  Lying, Pride, Cutting

  Graham Greene (1971). “The Power and the Glory”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean.

  Carson McCullers

  Stupid, Wine, Mean

  Carson McCullers (2010). “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, p.69, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination.

  Thrity Umrigar

  Spiritual, Real, Ambition

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• How rare were the tears of a dragon. We once lived in paradise and because of the corruption of an angel disgused as a dragon, all the world was cast into darkness. Now, as humans, we shed many tears-for what was lost, for what might of been, and for the end of friendships. Goodbye my true friends.

  Bryan Davis

  Goodbye, True Friend, Angel

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• Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion? A.Indeed I do think that I do. Q.Such as what? A.The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole.

  Tennessee Williams

  Thinking, Men, Duplicity

  Tennessee Williams, John S. Bak (2009). “New Selected Essays: Where I Live”, p.84, New Directions Publishing

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• You may have to declare your forgiveness a hundred times the first day and the second day, but the third day will be less and each day after, until one day you will realize that you have forgiven completely. And then one day you will pray for his wholeness and give him over to me so that my love will burn from his life every vestige of corruption.

  William P. Young

  Giving, One Day, Each Day

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• It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) "There is always something." And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge." And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Night, Men, Judging

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.286, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.

  Angela Carter

  Eye, Mirrors, Sight

  Angela Carter (2012). “The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories”, p.6, Random House

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• Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermin had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills. Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Animal, Men, Skills

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2005). “The Shadow of the Wind”, p.96, Penguin

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• He could smell her morality, the sweet rot of corruption

  Cassandra Clare

  Sweet, Smell, Morality

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• A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

  Virginia Woolf

  Lying, People, Feelings

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.184, Broadview Press

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• I hate ingratitude more in a man than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, or any taint of vice whose strong corruption inhabits our frail blood".

  William Shakespeare

  Gratitude, Strong, Hate

  'Twelfth Night' (1601) act 3, sc. 4, l. [390]

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• Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.

  Frank Herbert

  Power, Power And Corruption, Suspects

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• One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.

  Upton Sinclair

  Political, Democracy, Capitalism

  Upton Sinclair (2016). “The Jungle”, p.387, First Avenue Editions

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• Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;
  Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
  And loathsome canker lies in sweetest bud.
  All men make faults.

  William Shakespeare

  Lying, Moon, Men

  Sonnet 35

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• I grant this mode of secluding boys from the intercourse of private families has a tendency to make them scholars, but our business is to make them men, citizens, and Christians. The vices of young people are generally learned from each other. The vices of adults seldom infect them. By separating them from each other, therefore, in their hours of relaxation from study, we secure their morals from a principal source of corruption, while we improve their manners by subjecting them to those restraints which the difference of age and sex naturally produce in private families.

  Benjamin Rush

  Christian, Education, Sex

  Benjamin Rush (1988). “Essays: Literary, Moral and Philosophical”, Union College

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• Truth is not determined by majority vote.

  Douglas Gwyn

  Witty, Truth, Majority Vote

  "Why not pick *nice* places for the Usenix conventions?". Douglas Gwyn's post in USENET newsgroup comp.org.usenix, groups.google.com. July 3, 1991.

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• To reverence the impersonal creation instead of the personal God who created us is a perversion designed for escaping moral accountability to the Creator. God indicts those who worship the creation instead of its Creator (Rom 1:18-23); and warns of the corruption of morals and behavior which results.

  Dave Hunt

  Atheist, Creator God, Escaping

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• Man's want of original righteousness and of holy affections toward God, and the corruption of his moral nature and his bias toward evil is called depravity

  Henry Clarence Thiessen

  Men, Evil, Want

  Henry Clarence Thiessen (1979). “Lectures in Systematic Theology”, p.191, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• Poverty cannot be accepted as a pretext and justification for the exploitation of children. It does not explain the huge global demand with, in many instances, customers from rich countries circumventing their national laws to exploit children in other countries. Sex tourism has spread its illicit wings wide, and paedophiles search for their victims in all parts of the globe. The problem is compounded by the criminal networks which benefit from the trade in children, and by collusion and corruption in many national settings.

  Vitit Muntarbhorn

  Country, Sex, Children

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• No one wrote better about the sin of pride, the corruption of power and the redemption of love. I will miss you, Gabriel García Márquez.

  Laila Lalami

  Pride, Missing, Gabriel

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