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Corruption Quotes

Browse 1954 quotes about Corruption.

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Corruption Quotes

“The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against "corruption" and for "transparency." They want the Rule of Law - as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardise a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment.”

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Author:Arundhati Roy
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“In a free country, America, or India, and Japan, and many places, democracy country, free country, but still within the sort of rule of law, some injustice, some sort of problems, some discrimination, and also some sort of scandals or the corruptions. These things, you see, they are always in my mind, I think many people agree, lack of moral principle.”

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Author:Dalai Lama
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“The massive corruption common in so many developing countries would be quite impossible if Western countries did not provide convenient opportunities to ship ill-gotten funds out of the country. It wouldn't make much sense for a ruler to store in his basement large quantities of stolen cash in his own country's currency. A corrupt ruler wants to be able to keep this money safe and to be able to spend it. And for this, he needs to convert it into a Western currency and store it in a bank abroad, where it can also earn investment returns and be bequeathed to his heirs.”

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Author:Thomas Pogge
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“The Islamic world is not only suffering from the American occupation of Palestine and Iraq, it's also suffering from the unbelievable corruption in Afghanistan by Afghans themselves and also in Iraq - I'm just giving these 2 examples of countries which are under direct occupation; I do not mean at all to negate the terrible events that led to this or what's going on with the foreign occupation there.”

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Author:Seyyed Hossein Nasr
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“The pope [Francis] takes his vocabulary from his pastoral experience, not from the rhetorical tool kit of liberation theology, with its Marxist yammering about "center" and "periphery." The "peripheries," for Francis, are all those who have fallen through the cracks of late-modernity and post-modernity - in his native Argentina, because of colossal corruption, political and financial.”

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Author:George Weigel
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“We read so much about incompetence and corruption in all sorts of places. I'm not just thinking of the United Kingdom and the United States. Almost everywhere there seems to me to be an increase in incompetence and general dishonesty. This is what I mean about democracy - you feel that you've got the ability to arrange things and influence matters and it's not quite so easy as that, I'm afraid.”

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Author:Colin Dexter
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“People don't realize that when Iranians marched against the shah, their goal was not to have a religious government take over. Everybody marched against the shah. There were communists and feminists and student groups. It's very much like what's going on in the U.S. now, with people following Trump. It's not that they want Trump. They want a radical change, is really what people are saying. With the shah, people were just so sick of the corruption they said just get rid of him.”

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Author:Firoozeh Dumas
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“It is odd that a value/virtue that plays such a central role in dramatic literature has played such a small role in philosophical writing. There are probably a number of reasons, but I think that a predilection for a certain kind of individualism is a major one. Others might include the fashionability of consequentialism, the idea that loyalty has more to do with sentiment than reason, as well as its proneness to corruption. The revival of interest in virtue/character as distinct from rules/principles has also created space for a renewed, if hesitant, interest in loyalty.”

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Author:John Kleinig
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“We've got oligarchs. There are certain people that benefit in the Russian sphere if you will. The oligarchs who basically feed Putin, they've got to be hurt without hurting the people. The people are hurting bad enough in Russia, and they're very skeptical of what's going on and all of the corruption goes on in Russia. Russia is not our ally. Russia is not our friend. And to treat Putin as an ally and a friend is wrong.”

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Author:Joe Manchin
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“Impeachment is our system's last resort for someone who treats himself or herself as above the law, the most relevant thing is whether this president, by his recent course of action, on top of his violations of the foreign corruption or emoluments clause, this president has shone that he cannot be trusted to remain within the law and our constitution's last resort for situations of that kind is to get the person out of office.”

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Author:James R. Clapper
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“It's pretty obvious there's a lot of corruption in the world right now. That takes many forms. There's economic, political, religious, social corruption. Just the manipulation that takes place with all the information that people are given, and even just the way the world is presented as this concrete block, this concrete idea that there's not really an alternative at this point in the world. You can't really go off and live your own life off in your own world.”

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Author:Mark McGwire
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“Navalny is a blogger-turned-activist, but he finds stuff and he puts together these very, very clever, very high production value videos which underline the corruption at the top of the system, and there are millions of people who watch them. Some people think he must have some kind of protection inside the system because he hasn't yet been completely put out of commission; he's allowed to go on. He himself has said he wants to run for president.”

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Author:Anne Applebaum
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“Change can only come from local citizens and politicians - it cannot be imposed by well-meaning foreigners - not least because a society like Afghanistan or Iraq is suspicious of outsiders and often resistant to change. I am not going to get drawn into the ethics of intervening in other countries. My concern is the practical question. Can you actually achieve change in this way? My guess is we can stop wars sometimes as in the Balkans and topple regimes - but that the other stuff - such as corruption is not within our power to effect and alter.”

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Author:Rory Stewart
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“People already think the court is there to become the final word on controversial political questions. So everybody looks to the Supreme Court as the final word on abortion or immigration or what have you. It's not what it's for. It's never intended to be such. It's just another institution that has been corrupted and it's facing total corruption depending on the outcome of this election.”

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Author:Rush Limbaugh
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“I think the gap between the rich and the poor is a dangerous phenomenon in Russia and it needs the attention of the state. The only reasonable way to correct the situation today is not to go after big businesses, but to give breathing room to medium and small businesses. That means protecting citizens and small entrepreneurs from arbitrary rule and from corruption. It means investing the revenues from the national natural resources into the national infrastructure, education and health care. And we must learn to do so without shameful theft and embezzlement.”

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Author:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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“I'm specifically referring to this certain feeling of sadness, fear, and helplessness that descended on me at the Mexico City protest a day or two after the Narvarte murders. Many of us have grown familiar with that feeling. Every few weeks or so it seems we're hit with some new crime or some new corruption scandal that isn't quite the same as a massacre, but that spawns a feeling of futility and despair in its own way.”

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Author:Francisco Goldman
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“There is a culture of corruption in many parts of the Mexican media, of course. It seems that there are fewer and fewer media outlets that permit authentic free expressions. But Mexico also has extraordinary journalists who, despite the dangers they face, have also been leading the way in this battle, who've really played a role in keeping the cause of justice alive in the Ayotzinapa case. And no matter what, they'll keep doing that.”

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Author:Francisco Goldman
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“Corruption is a fact of life in America as in Afganistan, but as American citizens, if we are white, we tend to experience it as an opportunity cost. I live in Washington, DC, where the city council is notoriously corrupt. But how do I experience that? Maybe in streets that are not as well paved as they could be, maybe in a bridge that costs a lot more money than it should have. That's a little bit abstract - shocking, of course - but still abstract.”

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Author:Sarah Chayes
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“In countries like Afghanistan, the corruption is in your face. In Nigeria, I heard of judges making sex the bargaining chip rather than money. Now let's put that in the context of an honor-based society. Imagine that you're the brother of a woman who got raped by a judge to have her case heard in court. What do you want to do? You want to kill the judge. So here is an insurgent movement that hands you a gun. You have rage, and they give you an outlet for your rage.”

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Author:Sarah Chayes
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“The more I've reflected on that and asked Iraqi friends, the more I realize that the corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power. There's no core to what Michel Aflaq has to say that results in this. That was a key to looking at Michel Aflaq as a sideshow. He's the intellectual father of an ideology that no one probably ever believed in. At that point I began to appreciate him in a funny way.”

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Author:Elliott Colla
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“The first Tea Party protest was scheduled for Inauguration Day. So what were they upset about? Which part of the job he was doing before he even did it were they upset about? Secondly, if they claim to be upset with government corruption, government takeover, crazy spending, where were they from 2000 to 2008? Right? And why weren't they protesting the stolen elections?”

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Author:Janeane Garofalo
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“I would never join the Tea Partiers, because I don't have a problem with the color of Obama's skin. I don't have a problem with immigrants. You know what I mean? I do have genuine problems with policy and government corruption. Sure I do. And I speak very candidly about that, regardless of who's in office. But since the Tea Partiers are ridiculous, why would I urge anyone to participate with them?”

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Author:Janeane Garofalo
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“The claim that democracy and efficiency are contradictory is nonsense. That's evident in the history of democracy itself, because it is only democrats who were and continue to be capable of learning from mistakes. A more appropriate question is to ask whether a country like China, which has been so incredibly successful economically, is actually inefficient in light of its environmental destruction and its corruption. In China's perception, however, the democratic model is doubtlessly inferior.”

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Author:Sigmar Gabriel
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