Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911 – 1983)
Novelist, historian, poet, and biographer.
All is forgiven to kings and popes. History grants them immunity, even a full pardon, even when they admit their crimes and glory in them.
Conquest, tyranny, treachery, and the clash of cultures bring about corrupt societies, and so does old age. Sometimes the five faces of corruption are visible at the same time.
It is almost a general rule that nations do not decline gradually. Instead they fall abruptly from their greatest heights.
The corrupt man is nearly always rootless, deeply aware of his rootlessness.
Sometimes societies die and putrefy long before they are pronounced dead, and sometimes men die of corruption long before they have taken to their deathbeds.
The corrupt, when found out, become especially good moralists.
The game of power is played remorselessly by men who have not the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, the way ordinary people live, and the ordinary people are too terrified to protest.
For domination has nothing whatsoever to do with good government, and power as an end in itself destroys good government.
In the Middle Ages the king offered protection to his subjects in return for their loyalty, and the subjects were doubly protected, for the church also sheltered them. The need for shelter - for a father image that cares and will hopefully provide and give some meaning to human lives - remains as real as it was in the Middle Ages, but modern technocracy has no place for either the father or the church and provides no substitute.
Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline.
A nation's wealth is too serious a matter to be left to the wealthy. The riches of a nation belong to all, to be shared among all for the general welfare.
The United States is dangerously close to being a plutocracy. A third of the private wealth is owned by less than 5 percent of the population.
Throughout the history of Christianity, there had been a core of belief that man was not doomed to be everlastingly corrupt.
Nietzsche's accomplishment is that he permits us to see corruption from the inside.
Historically the first philosopher to enquire deeply into the nature of corruption in society was Ibn Khaldun (1322-1406), whose wandering life was largely spent in the northern littoral of Africa at a time when kingdoms and sultanates were crumbling.
His worst crime was that he gave no hope to the young.
It is no more rational to have lawyers in positions of power than it would be to have garbage collectors in positions of power. And in human terms garbage collectors would be preferable.
At the heart of the mystery of corruption lies the desire of one man to impose his will on others to the largest possible extent.
Where there had been hope, there was now hopelessness. Where there had been courage, there was now cynicism. Where there had been life, there was a living death. During Nixon's reign, much of life was transformed into a nightmare.
The second corruption of the state is oligarchy (oligos = few), in which the military elite is narrowed down to a few ruling families of immense wealth and prestige, who now openly flaunt their wealth and possessions.