Jerry Pournelle Quotes

Legal plunder has two roots: One, as we have just seen, is in human selfishness; the other is in false philanthropy.

A corrupt society is terrible for humanity and great for business.

Corruption is just another form of tyranny.

Greed is the inventor of injustice as well as the current enforcer.

I believe the root of all evil is abuse of power.

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.

... an apathetic indifferent meat in a sandwich that has an ever thinning slice of maniacal Plutocratic Gluttony on top and an ever thickening slice of rotten vermin rottening at the bottom.

I'm not an expert on politics, but there's a bunch of bad people at the top who care about lining their own pockets before creating a society that looks after the vulnerable.

Unhampered corruption breeds more corruption.

Tis pleasant purchasing our fellow-creatures; And all are to be sold, if you consider Their passions, and are dext'rous; some by features Are brought up, others by a warlike leader; Some by a place--as tend their years or natures; The most by ready cash--but all have prices, From crowns to kicks, according to their vices.

The fact is that my native land is a prey to barbarism, that in it men's only God is their belly, that they live only for the present, and that the richer a man is the holier he is held to be.

We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

Government Steals from the needy and gives to the greedy

The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile.

The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.

The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.

Somewhere along the way, the idea, which I think was initially to get some fair transaction between people, went out the window. And what came in was, the most you can get and the least you can give. That's why cars are the way they are nowadays. It's just an erosion of all the things that were true and right about the original idea.

The music business is just the worst as far as Machiavellian, sharky, evil games going on, as far as manipulation.

self-interest usually brings injustice with it.

At length corruption, like a general flood (So long by watchful ministers withstood), Shall deluge all; and avarice, creeping on, Spread like a low-born mist, and blot the sun.

Nothing so evil as money ever grew to be current among men. This lays cities low, this drives men from their homes, this trains and warps honest souls till they set themselves to works of shame; this still teaches folk to practise villainies, and to know every godless deed. But all the men who wrought this thing for hire have made it sure that, soon or late, they shall pay the price.

When we see the shameful fortunes amassed in all quarters of the globe, are we not impelled to exclaim that Judas' thirty pieces of silver have fructified across the centuries?