"I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"If absolute power corrupts absolutely, where does that leave God?"
— George Deacon

"Experience has shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."
— Thomas Jefferson

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."
— Mark Twain

"The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn't for any religious reasons. They couldn't find three wise men and a virgin."
— Jay Leno

"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. The bamboozle has captured us. 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

"Do you know we are being led to
Slaughters by placid admirals

& that fat slow generals are getting
Obscene on young blood

Do you know we are ruled by t.v.
"
— Jim Morrison (Jim Morrison's an American Prayer)

"Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power."
— Eric Hoffer

"When honor and the Law no longer stand on the same side of the line, how do we choose[?]"
— Anne Bishop (Heir to the Shadows)

"To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism."
— G. Edward Griffin

"“I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him."
— Alexandr Solzhenitzyn (at Harvard 1978)

"Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind. "
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"You know, it's pretty easy reading this book to see why I was angry and confused for all those years. I lived my life being told different stories: some true, some lies and I still don't know which is which. Children are born innocent. At birth we are very much like a new hard drive - no viruses, no bad information, no crap that's been downloaded into it yet. It's what we feed into that hard drive, or in my case "head drive" that starts the corruption of the files."
— Nikki Sixx (The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star)

"If you think Hollywood is depressing and corrupt, politics is really depressing and corrupt -- and fueled even more than Hollywood by money -- if that's possible."
— Ben Affleck

"Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministraions so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio."
— Lafcadio Hearn (Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn)