Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911 – 1983)
Novelist, historian, poet, and biographer.
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.
For domination has nothing whatsoever to do with good government, and power as an end in itself destroys good government.
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.
The corrupt, when found out, become especially good moralists.
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 man is nearly always rootless, deeply aware of his rootlessness.
It is almost a general rule that nations do not decline gradually. Instead they fall abruptly from their greatest heights.
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.