#corruption

There’s always someone bigger and badder who can knock you off your perch—even if you’re me. Never forget it and you don’t have to worry about corruption. You’ll be too afraid with watching your own back. --Alexandria "Dria" McAndrews ↗

— C.J. Ellisson

#paranoia #power #death

Plato argued that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will always find a way around law. By pretending that procedure will get rid of corruption, we have succeeded only in humiliating honest people and provided a cover of darkness and complexity for the bad people. There is a scandal here, but it's not the result of venal bureaucrats. (1994) p. 99 ↗

— Philip K. Howard

#bureaucrats #conservative #corruption #government #plato

-The very absence of the freedom to criticise against your own or any other government is all the more a reason to loudly shout-out for democracy! If that is wrong, Drew boldly went on, -then I would rather be wrong then to be numbered among the majority of the so-called righteous people whose only mandate seems to be controlling people. If a government is against its people expressing themselves, then that government is obviously hiding something criminal from its people and the world, and it is therefore afraid of being exposed and losing whatever power it has. ↗

— Andrew James Pritchard

#individual-freedom #repression #society #freedom

Experiment or not, the government is always watching. - Felix ↗

— Donna Galanti

#murder #secret-agent #experience

At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism. Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers? ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#capitalism #corporations #dam #economics #environmental-degradation

Experience has shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#complacency #corruption #decline #misgovernment #political-philosophy

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave. ↗

— Mark Twain

#censorship #christianity #evil #hubris #moral-corruption

Newt Gingrich, buddy, the people of the United States don’t like you. And the only reason the rest of the world doesn’t despise you is because they don’t know you. Thankfully you won’t have to experience that global derision, as you have reached the pinnacle of your career as a crook—I mean politician. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#corruption #creep #crook #crooked #despise

To be surrounded by sixty people who make your life miserable is to be at a family reunion. But to be surrounded by 600,000 people who make the whole world miserable is to live in Washington DC. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#corruption #family #family-reunion #miserable #misery

As a columnist, I realize that whatever amount of corruption I expose, half my readers will block it out, although they may get a frisson of joy in the process. ↗

— Margaret Carlson

#amount #block #columnist #corruption #expose