Robert Payne Famous Quotes
Reading Robert Payne quotes, download and share images of famous quotes by Robert Payne. Righ click to see or save pictures of Robert Payne quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.
... perhaps vulgarity is the price one pays for possessing no civilisation of one's own.
Corruption appears to be a universal phenomenon that lays its own imperious claims on the world, and therefore it is the duty of all nations to prepare themselves against its onslaught by taking proper precautions.
A totalitarian dictatorship cannot explain; it can only suppress.
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.
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.
Naked power has its limitations, since power is a generator of corruption and corruption in its turn tends to dilute the effectiveness of power.
It is precisely when we help one another that we gain our victories over corruption, but the victory is assured only when we help one another with all our strength.
For domination has nothing whatsoever to do with good government, and power as an end in itself destroys good government.
Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline.
The small Hitlers are around us every day.
A culture is not only the language and the arts of a people. It is all their history, all their hopes for the future.
Corrupt men are always liars. Lies are their instruments, their pleasure, their solace. In time they come to believe their lies, or rather to half-believe them.
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.
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.
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.
Throughout the history of Christianity, there had been a core of belief that man was not doomed to be everlastingly corrupt.
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.
