Top 63 Bribery Quotes & Sayings

When Americans think of college these days, the first word that often comes to mind is 'debt.' And from 'debt' it's just a short hop to other unpleasant words, like 'payola,' 'kickback,' and 'bribery.'

One of the biggest curses from which India is suffering - I do not say that other countries are free from it, but I think our condition is much worse - is bribery and corruption. That really is a poison.

Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.

If religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding.

Most of the corruption in Albany is legal corruption, not illegal bribery. It comes from campaigns being funded by millionaires and corporations.

Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality. Morality is not bribery or threats. Religion is bribery and threats. Humans have morality. We don't need religion.

I do not spoil women. ... I don't send them flowers and gifts. . . . I'm saving those gestures until I am an unpleasant old man who must resort to bribery to win a woman's synthetic affections.

The crime of bribery of foreign officials is an offence under the Commonwealth Criminal Code.

We need Democrats and Republicans in Congress to work together to fashion a very comprehensive pushback to Russia, not just the cyber-hacking, but their bribery of officials in Europe, their social media campaign, their overt media campaign.

Most of the money given by rich people in "charity" is made up of conscience money, "ransom," political bribery, and bids for titles.... One buys moral credit by signing a cheque, which is easier than turning a prayer wheel.

Between friends there is no bribery. ... the relationship of friends is intrinsically fair and equal. Neither feels stronger or more clever or more beautiful than the other.

The Qaddafis, father and sons, speak the grammar of dictatorship: threats and bribery.

A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.

But there will be no justice, there will be no government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as long as the government and its officials permit bribery in any form.

Imagine if investors in Wal-Mart really cared about bribery at that company's overseas operations or safety standards at its overseas manufacturing plants. If investors pulled their capital, corporate leaders would have to respond.

You could not bribe honest people, but bad people would accept bribery.

In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is dredged up only as a final resort when the alternative options of deception, threat and bribery have all been exhausted.

If a politician takes a bribe to do what he thinks would have been best for the public anyway, he still goes to jail. If he's president, under a Constitution that refers to impeachment specifically for 'bribery,' as well other 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' he should still be removed.

The president has the power to sign or veto a bill. If he signs it, it becomes law. If he vetoes it, it does not become law. That's pretty much an absolute power, but if he signs a bill or vetoes a bill in return for a $100,000 payment, he's guilty of bribery and he can go to jail.

Donald Trump handles these nitwit reporters with a new and most disgraceful form of bribery.

The Indonesian nationalists, mainly Javanese, who threw the Dutch out - in 1949, after a four-year struggle - were keen to preserve their inheritance and emulated the coercion, deceit, and bribery of the colonial rulers.

You have to decide what those issues are for you. What do you think disqualifies a person from holding public office? I believe that the endorsement of the right to kill unborn children disqualifies a person from any position of public office. It's simply the same as saying that the endorsement of racism, fraud, or bribery, would disqualify him - except that child-killing is more serious than those.

Honesty stands at the gate and knocks, and bribery enters in.

Do not accept gifts; [because] that is bribery.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

I do deeply deplore, of the sake of the cause, the prevalent notion, that the clergy must be had, either by persuasion or by bribery. They will not need persuasion or bribery, if their hearts are with us; if they are not, we are better without them. It is idle to suppose that the kingdom of heaven cannot come on earth, without their cooperation.

It's so offensive that we have a man [Donald Trump] that has been accused by more than 10 women of sexual misconduct, not to mention fraud and bribery and all the other things that he's being investigated for, and he gets a total pass.

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 have tried my hand at bribery, blackmail, and deceit. And I've served time for everything, cept beggin on the street.

The American white man (not to speak of the Indian, the Negro, the Mexican) hasn't a ghost of a chance. If he has any talent he's doomed to have it crushed one way or another. The American way is to seduce a man by bribery and make a prostitute of him. Or else to ignore him, starve him into submission and make a hack of him.

William Andrews Clark was caught in a bribery scandal during a campaign for the U.S. Senate - he was said to describe the Montana legislators this way: 'I never bought a man who wasn't for sale.'

The structure of private campaign finance has essentially pre-corrupted our politicians, so that they can't even recognize explicit bribery because it feels the same as what they do every day.

That was what they did with themselves, those two Gracelings, along with a small band of friends: They stirred up trouble on a serious scale—bribery, coercion, sabotage, organized rebellion—all directed at stopping the worst behavior of the world’s most seriously corrupt kings.

Rather than let their product compete fully and fairly in the marketplace, FalconStor resorted to bribery and graft to win important contracts in a scheme that reached the highest levels of the company.

[the downfall of our political system is the] buying and selling of politicians...bribery. In the private sector, you're arrested for it. In the public sector, it's the norm.

You cannot rationalize what is not rational to begin with - as if lying were called truthization. There is no way to obtain more truth for a proposition by bribery, flattery, or the most passionate argument - you can make more people believe the proposition, but you cannot make it more true.

Politicians are expected to spend half their time talking to funders and to keep them happy. Given this context, it's not hard to see how a bribery charge can feel like a technical argument instead of a moral one.

Well, the problem is that when you mix discussion of official United States government business with discussion of your personal business, you can tread dangerously close to the bribery statutes.

In 2010, Republicans took control of politics in Alabama by advocating for increased transparency and an end to government corruption, but instead of ending it, they have raised the level of corruption to the point that the stench of dishonesty fills the air, decadence drives policy, and bribery is the norm in Montgomery.

The gorillas are not yet sufficiently advanced in evolutionary terms to have discovered the benefits of passports, currency-declaration forms, and official bribery, and therefore tend to wander backward and forward across the border as and when their beastly, primitive whim takes them.

Long after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian state and its security operatives still know who their long embedded human assets are, recruited by a mixture of bribery and blackmail. Some of those human assets are still in positions of influence.

The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the King of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable: There is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable, no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution.

You cannot 'rationalize' what is not rational to begin with - as if lying were called 'truthization.' There is no way to obtain more truth for a proposition by bribery, flattery, or the most passionate argument - you can make more people believe the proposition, but you cannot make it more true.

It is a great mistake to suppose that bribery and corruption, although they may be very convenient for gratifying the ambition or the vanity of individuals, have any great effect upon the fortunes or the power of parties. And it is a great mistake to suppose that bribery and corruption are means by which power can either be ob-tained or retained.

It looks like bribery. I mean,there is every appearance that Hillary Clinton was bribed to grease the sale of, what, 20 percent of America's uranium production to Russia, and then it was covered up by lying about a meeting with her home with the principals, and by erasing e-mails. And I presume we might know for sure whether there was or was not bribery if she hadn't wiped out you know, out thousands of e-mails.

Blackmail is more effective than bribery.

Fifa has lost the trust of the people. We cannot allow the architects and controllers of world football to get away with dragging the beautiful game through the grime of corruption and bribery.

As J.R. I could get away with anything - bribery, blackmail and adultery. But I got caught by cancer. I do want everyone to know that it is a very common and treatable form of cancer. I will be receiving treatment while working on the new 'Dallas' series.

I would like people to feel that they've understood something more about Siena than the usual Palio as seen by tourists. It is full of beauty, romance and tradition, but also power, schemes and bribery. It's Italy in a nutshell, with all its incredible mixture of beauty and betrayal.

Don't vote for Republicans or Democrats until they clean up the open system of bribery that we live under.

If bribery is good enough for Congress, it's good enough for me.

There are many hands touching ballots after a voter drops his ballot into the ballot box. There is no guarantee of ballot secrecy for anyone, which makes the whole system vulnerable to intimidation and bribery.

There is no trick of a magician or spell of a witch doctor, no drug or mesmerism or bribery or torture or coercion that can compare in power with the force for change unleashed in the human breast through the touch of love.

It was the BJP that betrayed me when one of its members made the Rs 150-crore bribery allegation against me without evidence.

If Christianity is a mere invention of man, and the Bible is not from God, how can infidels explain Jesus Christ? His existence in history they cannot deny. How is it that without force or bribery, without arms or money, He has made such an immensely deep mark on the world as He certainly has?

I don't think it's bribery; I think it's extortion. Bribery, you know, is when the person that's giving the money does it voluntarily. What it is in Washington is extortion because they all ask for the money.

In my opinion it is less shameful for a king to be overcome by force of arms than by bribery.

If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be able to do everything he can - including paying me off - to get that business? Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources.

Quid pro quo has an interesting history. It's originally a contract law term, not a criminal bribery term.

Until the nineteen-seventies, Western countries paid little attention to corruption overseas, and bribery was seen as an unpleasant but necessary part of doing business there. In some European countries, businesses were even allowed to deduct bribes as an expense.