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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.