Robert Payne Quotes

#1. It is almost a general rule that nations do not decline gradually. Instead they fall abruptly from their greatest heights.

Robert Payne

#2. Naked power has its limitations, since power is a generator of corruption and corruption in its turn tends to dilute the effectiveness of power.

Robert Payne

#3. Nietzsche's accomplishment is that he permits us to see corruption from the inside.

Robert Payne

#4. The game of power is played remorselessly by men who have not the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, the way ordinary people live, and the ordinary people are too terrified to protest.

Robert Payne

#5. Uncorrupted man, with God's blessing, advances across the fields of the universe as though he were walking down a country lane.

Robert Payne

#6. A culture is not only the language and the arts of a people. It is all their history, all their hopes for the future.

Robert Payne

#7. Sometimes societies die and putrefy long before they are pronounced dead, and sometimes men die of corruption long before they have taken to their deathbeds.

Robert Payne

#8. The corrupt man is nearly always rootless, deeply aware of his rootlessness.

Robert Payne

#9. Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline.

Robert Payne

#10. A totalitarian dictatorship cannot explain; it can only suppress.

Robert Payne

#11. Corruption appears to be a universal phenomenon that lays its own imperious claims on the world, and therefore it is the duty of all nations to prepare themselves against its onslaught by taking proper precautions.

Robert Payne

#12. It is no more rational to have lawyers in positions of power than it would be to have garbage collectors in positions of power. And in human terms garbage collectors would be preferable.

Robert Payne

#13. All is forgiven to kings and popes. History grants them immunity, even a full pardon, even when they admit their crimes and glory in them.

Robert Payne

#14. For domination has nothing whatsoever to do with good government, and power as an end in itself destroys good government.

Robert Payne

#15. The corrupt, when found out, become especially good moralists.

Robert Payne

#16. The small Hitlers are around us every day.

Robert Payne

#17. Long before the empire had reached its greatest extent, the Romans were bored by it.

Robert Payne

#18. Corrupt men are always liars. Lies are their instruments, their pleasure, their solace. In time they come to believe their lies, or rather to half-believe them.

Robert Payne

#19. The United States is dangerously close to being a plutocracy. A third of the private wealth is owned by less than 5 percent of the population.

Robert Payne

#20. ... perhaps vulgarity is the price one pays for possessing no civilisation of one's own.

Robert Payne

#21. The second corruption of the state is oligarchy (oligos = few), in which the military elite is narrowed down to a few ruling families of immense wealth and prestige, who now openly flaunt their wealth and possessions.

Robert Payne

#22. Throughout the history of Christianity, there had been a core of belief that man was not doomed to be everlastingly corrupt.

Robert Payne

#23. It is precisely when we help one another that we gain our victories over corruption, but the victory is assured only when we help one another with all our strength.

Robert Payne

#24. At the heart of the mystery of corruption lies the desire of one man to impose his will on others to the largest possible extent.

Robert Payne

#25. Historically the first philosopher to enquire deeply into the nature of corruption in society was Ibn Khaldun (1322-1406), whose wandering life was largely spent in the northern littoral of Africa at a time when kingdoms and sultanates were crumbling.

Robert Payne

#26. Conquest, tyranny, treachery, and the clash of cultures bring about corrupt societies, and so does old age. Sometimes the five faces of corruption are visible at the same time.

Robert Payne

#27. A nation's wealth is too serious a matter to be left to the wealthy. The riches of a nation belong to all, to be shared among all for the general welfare.

Robert Payne