Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Quotes
Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices thatmay accompany it. Accept no present whatever; let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck, for as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life.
Stanhope, Philip Dormer. Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to His Son, Philip Stanhope, Esq. Vol. 2, J. Dodsley, 1774, p. 396.
See {640733} for an English political leader’s similar view.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. From the point of view of the person or company that bribes or gives campaign contributions to legislators, there has often been a problem that when the heat is on the legislator might begin to refrain from voting as was expected. Twain was joking in this quotation by using the world “morality” to describe the obligation of the legislator to vote for the interest of the briber or campaign contributor. However, there were several major businessmen who actually saw the bribed legislator as having a moral and ethical duty to continue to protect the interest of the briber.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, was a British statesman, and a man of letters, and wit. Educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he subsequently embarked on the Grand Tour of the Continent, to complete his education as a nobleman, by exposure to the cultural legacies of Classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to become acquainted with his aristocratic counterparts and the polite society of Continental Europe.
