John Adams Quotes

This career [politics] of plundering and blundering.

Corruption is just another form of tyranny.

Some people are in positions of power, and when incentives go haywire, we are all human and it's easy to make mistakes. I am not saying everybody is Bernie Madoff.

In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.

In all cities, the better classes - the business men - are the sources of corruption, but they are so rarely pursued and caught that we do not fully realize whence the trouble comes.

Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.

Corruption exists everywhere.

Power is always a corrupting influence.

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

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

I'm very interested in how corruption works - and it's not necessarily the way one might expect.

Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it.

So easily do weak men put in high positions turn villains

I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature, and that power whether vested in many or few is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, 'Give, give.'

The squandering of the public money sinks into comparative insignificance as a temptation to corruption when compared with the squandering of the public lands.

Can we wonder that all has gone ill with us when our love of office survives in our very ruin?

We should submit to careful examination and review a system which places such vast powers for evil in the hands of irresponsible individuals and which makes the possession of land not a trust but a means of extortion and exaction.

Aid corrupts.

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

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

Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

One thing, and one thing only, prevents the establishment of a stable Central Government at Peking, and this is the insatiable greed of money which possesses every Chinese who attains to public office.

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.

It takes two to corrupt – the corrupted and the corrupter.

The great defect in the past custom is that executive patronage has come to be regarded as the property of the party in power.