The core of the concept of a bribe is an inducement improperly influencing the performance of a public function meant to be gratuitously exercised.

I was sailing from tedium to apathy with a side trip to torpor.

We are all afraid. That's the thing that unites all truly successful people: fear, fear of failing, fear of criticism, fear of letting down the team in some way. That why they try so hard, that's why they pay attention to detail and try to get every possible duck in a row. It's fear

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.

In ancient Israel and Rome the judge had appeared as a stand-in for the divine, and corruption was a blinding of the representative of the divine.

I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps.

If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.