George Osborne Quotes

People in Washington do things that they shouldn’t do because they owe somebody.

The Mexican government has been corrupt for 140 years.

Friendship is the most corrupting influence in politics.

As long as government exists, corruption will exist. It is an illness of government and can only be cured by the people.

Our aim should be to not allow a single corrupt politician or even a family member to enter the House.

In general, corruption tends to exist whenever governments have favors to extend, or something to sell.

No government functions without the grease of corruption.

Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.

Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a company is not allowed to provide a personal benefit to a decision maker in return for business. But hiring the sons and daughters of powerful executives and politicians is hardly just the province of banks doing business in China: it has been a time-tested practice here in the United States.

Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.

What we have now is a situation where politicians get a whole bunch of money from mainly business interests. Then once they hold that office, they spend all their time in office paying back over and over again those campaign contributions through various favors and contracts and that sort of thing.

Honest Graft

When you've got a guy who's in position to influence who gets what, the potential is always there for corruption.

What we affirm is that the theory which regards places in the public service as prizes to be distributed after an election, like plunder after a battle, the theory which perverts public trusts into party spoils, making public employment dependent on favor and not on proved merit, necessarily ruins the self-respect of public employees, destroys the function of party in a republic, prostitutes elections into a desperate strife for personal profit, and degrades the national character by lowering the moral tone and standard of the country.

Corruption can be a lubricant reducing the friction between new elites and old elites in a period of rapid change.

CBC: Corrupt Bastard’s Club

All governments are more or less corrupt.

Congress has become the center of legalized bribery/

What Westerners would call corruption is not a scourge of the system but the basic principle of its normal functioning. Corruption in Russia is a form of transactional grease in the absence of any generally accepted and legally codified alternative.

Big contributions from those who are seeking government favors are a menace to honest government.

In some of the countries where we operate, there is a tradition of corruption, in which the political elites work with business in the framework of unsavory relationships.

The Philippines, it has a politics of patronage. Family and favors, in addition to the old cliche of guns, goons and gold, really do still hold a lot of sway.

It's very simple. If the American people care about a lot of things including corruption in government, then, in fact, if you use the power to appoint in order to do political business, to clear fields, to save your party money and so on, if it's not a crime - and I believe it is - it certainly is business as usual, politics of corruption.

Behind every corrupt politician are 10-20 corrupt businessmen.

What people fail to appreciate is that the currency of corruption in elective office is, not money, but votes.