Robert Payne Quotes

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.

Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline.

Uncorrupted man, with God's blessing, advances across the fields of the universe as though he were walking down a country lane.

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.

The small Hitlers are around us every day.

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.

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.

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.

The corrupt, when found out, become especially good moralists.

A culture is not only the language and the arts of a people. It is all their history, all their hopes for the future.

Nietzsche's accomplishment is that he permits us to see corruption from the inside.

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.

It is almost a general rule that nations do not decline gradually. Instead they fall abruptly from their greatest heights.

Throughout the history of Christianity, there had been a core of belief that man was not doomed to be everlastingly corrupt.

For domination has nothing whatsoever to do with good government, and power as an end in itself destroys good government.

Long before the empire had reached its greatest extent, the Romans were bored by it.

The books of men have their day and grow obsolete. God's word is like Himself, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.

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 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.

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.

The corrupt man is nearly always rootless, deeply aware of his rootlessness.

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.