Institutional Decay Quotes

Orthodoxy is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead.

Our government is corrupt.

Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.

Donald Trump has taken a battering ram to longstanding political norms - the unwritten conventions that make governance possible. But even before he decided to run for president, those norms were under assault.

I know something. America is not broken, Washington, D.C. is broken.

We have been at war almost constantly since the last century. And it has not helped our institutions. Congress no longer represents the people. The courts do not practice justice any more. The armies never stop playing at being the policemen of the world and of oil.

The Senate is no longer a place for any decent man. I am truly sick of Congress.

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.

Corruption in Georgia was so bad that no one could imagine life without it.

Phoenix and Las Vegas have grim long-term prospects. On top of oil-and-gas problems, they will have terrible problems with water and the ability to produce food locally. I suppose it shows how delusional the public is, and how our institutional controls have decayed - for instance, lending standards.

The bigger the government, the greater the corruption

Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.

How oppressive the best institutions become in the course of a few generations …. shall a system of government or religion … endure for ever?

Pomp corrupts church officials

Its [the Communist party's] relationship to democratic institutions is that of a death watch beetle. It is not a party; it is a conspiracy.

Heads of the Church have often been narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers. The court is the leprosy of the Papacy … This Vatican-centered vision neglects the world around it and I will do everything to change it.

We have to change the system. The system is very rotten. The executive is corrupt, the Congress is corrupt, the judiciary is corrupt. ... So what's left We really have to have a radical and surgical change to bring back the image of our country.

Step by step, brick by brick, the edifice of India's legislature is being destroyed.

The State machine breaks often down in consequence of mistakes made forty and fifty years ago …

The constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruption's of time and party, its members would become despots.

All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members.

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

The CIA has become a hollow shell of words without deeds

A given order may at any given time fail to represent those values, even work against those values. I think that's the dynamic we're seeing today.

The U.S. increasingly has taken on the characteristics of what we describe as 'failed states.'