Nigerian Roman Catholic Church Secretariat Quotes

We are asking Nigerians for their cooperation. They shouldn't expect miracles to happen a couple of months after we've taken over because the destruction took so many years - 16 years of the ruling party's rule of this country.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

We are in a bad way. That herd of wild asses' colts [see Job 11:12], braying and kicking up their heels, is an unsatisfactory result of a hundred years of Democracy.

A government, … protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.

I am inheriting a country which has been badly ravaged by years of misrule and ineptitude. There has been a wide disconnect between the people and the government.

When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.

By and large, our political system has betrayed its promise to each new generation of Filipinos, not a few of whom are voting with their feet, going abroad and leaving that system behind.

As I look around, I get this sinking feeling that we're off track, that there's something sick in the soul of our country. I examine the fruit that's hanging on the tree of America, and I can see that it's rotting. And that concerns me deeply.

When a nation is over-reliant on one or two commodities like oil or precious minerals, corrupt government ministers and their dodgy associates hoard profits and taxes instead of properly allocating them to schools and hospitals.

Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.

We live in a very dysfunctional society, and this is a very, very dysfunctional Administration.

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

We are very fond of blaming the poor for destroying the environment. But often it is the powerful, including governments, that are responsible.

I think there is a break down of trust generally, between people and politicians. I think that's come about for a whole variety of reasons.

For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself. Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in.

Politicians are so detested. And the main cause is not policy; it's the fact that there is no trust.

The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.

Both parties are impossibly corrupt and the public thoroughly indifferent.

For there is nothing so social by nature, [and] so unsocial by its corruption, as this race.

For America's elite there is never accountability. That is for the rest of us.

America is so terribly grim in spite of all that material prosperity.... Compassion and the old neighborliness have gone, people stand by and do nothing when friends and neighbors are attacked, libeled and ruined. The worst thing is what is done to the children. They are being taught to admire and emulate stool pigeons, to betray and to hate, and all in a sickening atmosphere of religious hypocrisy.

Who takes the blame: the leader who talks of poverty but lives in luxury, or the poor who choose a leader of that type?

Year after year we do not get reform as a result of scandals; we simply get more scandals.