Jason K. Stearns Quotes

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.

Law has become a business. Health care has become a business. Unfortunately, politics has also become a business. That really undermines society.

Sadly we have government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, and for the lobbyists. That is no way to run the Senate.

Washington is rigged to favor people who have an army of lobbyists.

One of the things that is so important, critical I think, in reading not just the founders but thousands of years as you put it, that discussion about corruption, is that you can't talk about the problem of corruption without talking about human nature.

Washington is dominated by big money.

The appalling reality in American politics today is that, when ideology and money mix, truth is a mere inconvenience.

Challenging and highlighting abusive power dynamics in our culture is my goal; replicating them is not.

American democracy is spoiled by people buying everything in sight and then selling and buying everything in sight, including our politicians.

But I don't write about sex for today's teenagers. Or Doc Martens boots either. I'm more interested in exploring how exactly the world is run, which doesn't really change that much from one generation to another.

Outsiders tend to be the first to recognize the inadequacies of our social institutions. But, precisely because they are outsiders, they are usually in a poor position to fix them.

The wrong people will do everything in their power to guarantee that the wrong political climate will continue. It seems, then, that the wrong people ensure the wrong political climate and the wrong political climate ensures the wrong people. How then to break free of this vicious circle?

And when people in power can stay in power they do very little to tinker with the apparatus that put them in power.

Some of those men in power, we just have to change their faces because we're not going to change their minds.

For a free country to continue thriving, there have to be regular reforms, because any society, any economy that stays in place, you're going to see repeated attempts to exploit the openings for twisting policy to the advantage of those who already have wealth and power.

In every truth, the beneficiaries of a system cannot be expected to destroy it.

There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

If, as is natural, you focus on the corruption and on those threatened institutions that are trying to prevent change - even though they don't really know what they're trying to prevent - then you can get pessimistic.

Incorruptibility by money is the old story... Now it's incorruptibility by media.

There is complete disdain for all that exists .... History, society, and the economics of present institutions are all minor issues in choosing a reform program ...

How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object -- the happiness of man -- to the selfish interest of kings, nobles, and priests.

A revolution [is] not a single act, but rather a chain of collisions and conflicts with the ruling class, which is never ready to submit itself to the will of a democratic majority, but rather defends its predominant position with all means at its disposal, with the help of the powers which the state has built up—the army, the police, the courts and the church

Realists assert that a tradition so deeply ingrained in a people is bound to permeate the life of West Africa for so long as racial memory functions, and that gift-giving and perquisite-taking (words more polite than bribery and corruption) have always stimulated the roots of African business and social relationships.

Every link in the chain that runs from the corporation desiring political favors down to the policeman on the beat levying his toll on the prostitute or the apple-seller is too strong to have been broken yet.