Profoundly inspirational corruption quotes will encourage you to think a little deeper than you usually would and broaden your perspective.
Famous Corruption Quotes
Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash. – Robert A. Heinlein
Corruption is authority plus monopoly minus transparency. – Anonymous
Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains. – Robinson Jeffers
One must beware of ministers who can do nothing without money, and those who want to do everything with money. – Indira Gandhi
There is no greater fraud than a promise not kept. – Scottish Proverb
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. – Saul Alinsky
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. – Carl Sagan
The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one’s self. All sin is easy after that. – Pearl Bailey
No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful. – Kurt Vonnegut
The goal of every culture is to decay through over civilization; the factors of decadence, luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next. – Cyril Connolly
It’s totally corrupt man. – James Dye
The bad apples are at the top. They enjoy murdering the innocent people. – James Dye
A bad forgery’s the ultimate insult. – Jonathan Gash
I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman. – Graham Greene
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts. – Ernest Hemingway
We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends. – Eric Hoffer
I am against government by crony. – Harold L. Ickes
Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth. – D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism. – Walter Lippmann
The sun shineth upon the dunghill and is not corrupted. – John Lyly
The USA has become government by the highest bidder because USA voters do not hold politicians accountable. – Don Mashak
The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference. – Bess Myerson
When rich villains have need of poor ones, poor ones may make what price they will. – William Shakespeare
It is a fraud to borrow what we are unable to pay. – Publilius Syrus
The jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honor feels. – Alfred Lord Tennyson
There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. – Henry David Thoreau
The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end. – Leon Trotsky
There is something in corruption which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon, and sees everything stained and impure. – Thomas Paine
Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of democracy, as they undoubtedly are today. – Mahatma Gandhi
Corruption is just another form of tyranny. – Joe Biden
If corruption had already taken root, then good seeds must be preserved. – Toba Beta
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind. – Emil Cioran
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
The corruption of the positively wicked is often less sad and fatal to society than the irregularities of a virtuous man who yields and falls. – Joseph Francis Edward Desmarais
The corruption of people is to behave in an inhuman way. – Alan Bullock
Corruption is simply crime without conscience. – George Richard Marek
The corruption of every government begins nearly always with that of principles. – Charles de Montesquieu
Corruption, the greatest single bane of our society today. – Olusegun Obasanjo
The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means. – Georges Bernanos
Corruption is the enemy of development, and of good governance. It must be got rid of. Both the government and the people at large must come together to achieve this national objective. – Pratibha Patil
Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations. – Thomas Jefferson
The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst. – David Hume
Corruption is a cancer that steals from the poor, eats away at governance and moral fibre and destroys trust. – Robert Zoellick
Corruption ultimately guilts the corrupt, and it hardens the innocent who suffer as a result of it. It isn’t the young who corrupt the old, rather it’s the inverse. The aim of the old should be to ensure that the young grow up incorruptible. – Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts perhaps the fear of a loss of power. – John Steinbeck
Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power. – George Bernard Shaw
Corruption has its own motivations, and one has to thoroughly study that phenomenon and eliminate the foundations that allow corruption to exist. – Eduard Shevardnadze
Corruption is nature’s way of restoring our faith in democracy. – Peter Ustinov
Corruption is a tree; whose branches are of an immeasurable length: they spread everywhere; and the dew that drops from thence hath infected some chairs and stools of authority. – Francis Beaumont
The corruption of the age is made up by the particular contribution of every individual man; some contribute treachery, others injustice, atheism, tyranny, avarice, cruelty, according to their power. – Michel de Montaigne
Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it’s set a rolling it must increase. – Charles Caleb Colton
Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty. – Edward Gibbon
Corruption wins not more than honesty. – William Shakespeare
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything. – Albert Einstein
Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. – Milton Friedman
Corruption is man’s inheritance. – Anacletus
Those who fight corruption should be clean themselves. – Vladimir Putin
