Tag: government corruption

“The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.”

Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“When you’re dealing with frauds and liars, listen more to what they don’t say than what they do.”

DaShanne Stokes

“The USA is a beautiful country…when you take the corrupt corporations and their government minions out of the equation.”

Steven Magee

“When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Not Guilty’.”

Theodore Roosevelt

“Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.”

Henry Kissinger

“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Mark Twain

“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that’ve long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them.”

George Carlin

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

Carl Sagan

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”

John Steinbeck

“A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”

Theodore Roosevelt

“In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.”

H.L. Mencken

“Are there good governments and bad governments? No, there are only bad governments and worse governments.”

Charles Bukowski

“Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature such as self preservation? (CIA Document, Project ARTICHOKE, MORI ID 144686, 1952)
As cited by Dr Ellen P. Lacter, p57”

Orit Badouk Epstein

“What is it about the government and its agents and employees that they can lie to us with impunity, but we risk being sent to jail if we lie to them?”

Andrew P. Napolitano

“I was right outside the NSA [on 9/11], so I remember the tension on that day. I remember hearing on the radio, ‘the plane’s hitting,’ and I remember thinking my grandfather, who worked for the FBI at the time, was in the Pentagon when the plane hit it…I take the threat of terrorism seriously, and I think we all do. And I think it’s really disingenuous for the government to invoke and sort-of scandalize our memories to sort-of exploit the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through — and to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don’t need to give up, and that our Constitution says we should not give up.”

Edward Snowden

“It’s not about electing the right people. It’s about a narrowing their responsibilities.”

John Stossel