Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.

Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.

We have a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing. It is growing daily.

If we do not effectively carry out the struggle against corruption, it will spread like pestilence, and the Communist Party will destroy itself.

The corruption of every government begins nearly always with that of principles.

It is the curse of the Labor movement that, as soon as it has acquired a certain “power,” it seeks to enlarge this power by unprincipled means. Social-Democracy also was originally “pure” in almost all countries. Most Social-patriots of today were real Marxists. By Marxist propaganda the masses were won, and as soon as the party gained “power,” they [the principled means] were abandoned.

Corruption is a cancer that steals from the poor, eats away at governance and moral fibre and destroys trust.

Wisdom degenerates in governments as governments increase in age.

It's hard to imagine a party that is not corrupted by hatred.

The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior.

It is the members of this business elite . . . that pose the greatest danger to our American way of life. They are the ones who've bought and paid for members of both political parties. . . .

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.

The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.

There's all different kinds of people, but I don't think it's that unusual that once you get like a little power, you get to do your weird thing even more.

I applaud strong government, but not overweening government sustained by cronies, ciphers and a personality cult.

Nothing so evil as money ever grew to be current among men. This lays cities low, this drives men from their homes, this trains and warps honest souls till they set themselves to works of shame; this still teaches folk to practise villainies, and to know every godless deed. But all the men who wrought this thing for hire have made it sure that, soon or late, they shall pay the price.

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.

When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands to be believed.

The Republican Party either corrupts its liberals or it expels them.

Every government is always growing corrupt.

The root of a nation's misfortunes has to be sought in the moral failings of the government.

Both political parties have a richly vested interest in corporate corruption.