Joseph Pulitzer Quotes

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.

Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.

I am a grafter.

Secrecy is the foundation of politics.

Prostitution and corruption are two things that mankind has had to live with for so long.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

Ambition is the mother of hypocrisy and prefers to skulk in corners and dark places. It cannot endure the light of day. It is an unclean vice wallowing in the depths, always hidden, but with ever an eye to advancement.

Fraud and deceit abound in these days more than in former times.

Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices that may accompany it.

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

Now as through this world I ramble, I see lots of funny men, Some rob you with a six gun, And some with a fountain pen.

Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues.

In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.

When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to [profess] things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Lying is a most disgraceful vice; it first despises God, and then fears men.

What day is so festal it fails to reveal some theft?

We're living in a den of thieves

What ever you do-Don't get caught.

Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotsman to draw the trigger at his death.

Now, neighbor confines, purge you of your scum! Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance, revel the night, rob, murder, and commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways?

Deceit is the false road to happiness; and all the joys we travel through to vice, like fairy banquets, vanish when we touch them.

Shew me a lyer, and I'le shew thee a theefe.