John Ensign Quotes

I'm very interested in how corruption works - and it's not necessarily the way one might expect.

Find the corrupt officials and then prosecute them and send them to prison!

The hanky-panky in public service that really matters is about money and not sex.

We've had corruption -- corruption doesn't exist only in Africa. Where there is a corruptee, there is a corrupter. Right? It's always a two-way process.

The Bank had never used the word 'corruption' at all until I got there, and the reason for that was, as the general counsel pointed out to me, that quite a number of our shareholders represented were not immune from corruption in their governments.

We don't know what proportion of public funds is regularly lost to collusion and corruption. Is it 25 per cent? 30 per cent? We do know that a portion of these public funds are feeding organized crime.

Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision.

Fighting corruption is not just good governance. It's self-defense. It's patriotism.

Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.

Nobody is going to call me 'Sergio 15,' someone who takes a 15 percent cut from every contract. We aren't stealing ... way too much money was stolen in the past.

We must rid the country of corruption, cronyism and nepotism.

Tolerance of corruption, explicit and implicit, has made it impossible to govern…. We need absolute transparency of all the assets of government officials.

Corruption in Saudi Arabia is quite different from corruption in most other countries, as it is not limited to a 'bribe' in return for a contract, or expensive gift for the family member of a government official or prince, or use of a private jet that is charged to the government so a family can go on vacation.

Theft and corruption in the private sector is as bad as that in government and must be dealt with decisively by law enforcement agencies.

Undisclosed and illegal payments, kickbacks, and bribes became a way of doing business at FIFA.

We need to rid our State Owned Enterprises of corruption because the money being siphoned out should be funding them.

Issues to do with corruption, issues of how we can straighten out our state-owned enterprises, and how we deal with 'state capture' are issues that are on our radar screen.

No economy can tolerate the level of corruption seen in Nigeria without consequences.

Our anti-corruption systems have inherently and intently been kept flawed.

Where the grifter is shameless, the grafter shrinks from exposure, which could only endanger the racket. He is greedy but not creatively ambitious. He toils in mundane self-dealing, insider trading, bribe taking, witness tampering, and other forms of workaday corruption.

If you talk about corruption, you can talk about a lot of things in life.

Crime does not pay as well as politics.

Behind every corrupt politician are 10-20 corrupt businessmen.

There is no part of the world where corruption is absolutely eliminated.

In the year since we brought things into the open with a clean breath of fresh air at City Hall, we have learned about corrupt spending practices and unethical conflicts of interest that waste your money... and keep Dallas from being the great city of our dreams.