Tom Fitton Quotes

What's troubling is that the Republicans to defend Mr. DeLay are weakening the ethics process.

Louisiana showed up at the top of a study of political corruption that calculated the number of convictions per capita. Georgia came out as worst on a corruption risk report from the State Integrity Investigation, which measured factors like accountability, transparency and ethics enforcement.

The Philippines is a country in which a man of morals can't be president, in which a politician who hasn't been linked to any wrongdoing isn't assumed to be honest, but merely better at hiding his corruption.

D.C. is more corrupt than Hollywood. It really is.

Ethics and Washington DC. Are they mutually exclusive?

There will be scandals. There will be scandals. And then maybe we can reform again.

The moment I decided to blow the whistle on a lot of the corruption going on in the White House, there are protections that are afforded to me.

I think the American government is now the most corrupt government in the world.

Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

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

People do not want politicians they know to be corrupt.

The quicker we get rid of the lobby system the better for all of us. I don't think in this day and age it is tenable to have these nods and winks, and on-the-record and off-the-record briefings.

I think the record shows that as Speaker, I have taken the lead in cleaning up politics.

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.

In 2004, I wrote 'What We've Lost,' a book about the Bush administration. It sold only reasonably well, in part, I think, because the book was a horrific downer, an unrelenting account of the administration's actions, bungles, deceptions, half-truths, untruths, and downright corruptions.

Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

I have never been bribed as a Prime Minister.

I don't think that Washington is a fundamentally bad or corrupt place.

So often the seeds of a Congressional ethics scandal are sown by the reforms of the last ethics scandal.

The assumption has to be that members of Congress are, like eunuchs in a harem, physically incapable of a conflict of interest.

Honorariums are really dishonorariums. So long as they continue, public trust in Congress will sink even below its minimal level today.... Public officials should have only one paymaster: the Government. When the Government pays too little, the temptation to find other paymasters becomes far harder to resist.

The Reagan people want four more years, but the way they're going some of them will get ten to twenty.

We can be lied to only so many times. The best thing that he [President Nixon] can do for the country is to get the hell out of the White House and get out this afternoon.

Good men and women come to Washington and get caught in a culture of corruption.