Bono Quotes

They have seized upon the government by bribery and corruption. They have made speculation and public robbery a science. They have loaded the nation, the state, the county, and the city with debt.

I knew President Yeltsin well. He would never have tolerated government officials demonstratively showing off the millions they acquired through corruption, the way it's done today.

Despite all the hoopla - despite all the umpa - after 5 years of UDP mismanagement, corruption, and incompetence, we have sunk deeper into debt of $2.4 billion: some $200 million deeper in debt.

We are angry about paying the highest income taxes and property taxes in the nation and getting less and less for it. We are angry about our incompetent, dysfunctional government that pays no attention to the desires of the people. We are angry about the cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interests and self-dealing that is Albany.

Paradoxically, resource-rich developing countries are often worse off than comparable countries that lack those resources. One reason for this is that large resource endowments provide a huge financial incentive for attempts to overthrow the government and seize power.

Many rich people in China made their fortunes by damaging natural resources and building corrupt relations with the government.

A lot of people are deeply dissatisfied by the diminishing control they have over their lives, because of the way our system of government is set up, to cater to the powerful, cater to the wealthy, cater to the corporations, and not to the individual American citizen.

The American people might have a criminal syndicate running their government.

Leaders in Africa are so corrupt that we are certain if we put dogs in uniforms and put guns on their shoulders, we'd be hard put to distinguish them.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.

Saddam spent 35 years stealing and wasting money, and all of these systems are very fragile and brittle, and you try to fix one thing and something else gets in trouble.

A constant stream of 'free' money is a perfect way to keep an inefficient or simply bad government in power. As aid flows in, there is nothing more for the government to do - it doesn't need to raise taxes, and as long as it pays the army, it doesn't have to take account of its disgruntled citizens.

Every government that exists -- or ever existed, or ever will exist -- is a kleptocracy, meaning "rule by thieves". Competing ideologies merely provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what they produce.

How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object -- the happiness of man -- to the selfish interest of kings, nobles, and priests.

Some governments are corrupt but are known for their competency in running the city. Others are incompetent but are considered "clean." [Washington] DC's government is scandalously corrupt and hopelessly incompetent.

For every amount the state collected [in taxes], the mandarin collectors took twice as much for themselves.

Yet all the poor commonly lay the blame on the Evil Government, excusing their own sloth, and luxury, as if their private goods forsooth were wasted by public exactions.

The problem is … that many African states lack the capacity to establish the crucial conditions for capital accumulation and, additionally, act in economically irrational ways. This non-developmental or even anti-developmental thrust is manifest in the mismanagement, inefficiency, and pervasive corruption of the public sector as well as political instability and the inability to prevent widespread evasion of laws and regulations.

Secrecy helps give oil wealth its democracy-repelling powers: citizens are satisfied with low taxes and seemingly generous benefits only when they do not realize how much of their country’s wealth is being lost to theft, corruption, and government incompetence.

Politics is a great art. It succeeds at convincing the people that they have to pay for what has been stolen from them.

A state becomes “rentier” if oil, gas, and mineral rents constitute over 40 percent of its revenues…. This maintains the rulers.

When you steal from the government, you steal from yourself.

Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes... to an extent, that's true elsewhere, including the United States, but it's been pretty extreme in Greece.

Societies that depend on natural resources tend to have certain inherent problems. The limited concentration of wealth - whether from oil, coal, diamonds, or bauxite - often leads to corruption and authoritarianism.

Income inequality and government corruption are both unfortunate realities in the United States.