Interviewed by Ramsay Cook in Eleanor Cook's The Craft of History (1973)
“Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.”
As quoted in The Other 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1984) by Robert Byrne
1980s
Variant: Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
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Do you have more details about the quote "Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad." by Henry Kissinger?
Henry Kissinger 50
United States Secretary of State 1923–2023Related quotes
“Ninety percent of paid work is time-wasting crap. The world gets by on the other ten.”
John Derbyshire
(1945) writer
Source: Wishing I’d Played the Ponies http://takimag.com/article/wishing_id_played_the_ponies/print#axzz3xNaU2RAk, Taki's Magazine, June 16, 2011.
Arjo Klamer
(1953) Dutch columnist, economist and politician
Arjo Klamer, cited in: Hans von der Brelie, " The Dutch face austerity http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/25/the-dutch-face-austerity," at euronews.com, 2012/05/25
Albert Einstein
(1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 31
Spoken on hearing German marchers singing war songs. On p. 474 of Alice Calaprice's The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, she lists "we only use 10 percent of our brain" as a quote "misattributed to Einstein", perhaps this is the source of the misquote? Einstein seems to be speaking metaphorically here, not endorsing the myth http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percent.asp that science has shown 90 percent of the neurons in our brain lie dormant. And the myth dates back to before this interview, for example the book Mind Myths: Exploring Popular Assumptions About the Mind and Brain, edited by Sergio Della Salla, has a chapter by Barry L. Beyerstein titled "Whence Cometh the Myth that We Only Use 10% of our Brains?" which shows on p. 11 an advertisement from the 1929 World Almanac containing the line "There is NO LIMIT to what the human brain can accomplish. Scientists and psychologists tell us we use only about TEN PER CENT of our brain power."
Context: What a betrayal of man's dignity. He uses the highest gift, his mind, only ten percent, and his emotions and instincts ninety percent.
George Orwell
(1903–1950) English author and journalist
According to Reuters Fact Check team there is no evidence of the quotation in collections of Orwell’s works. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-orwell-quote-corrupt-idUSKCN2AT2W5
“Ninety percent of them [artists in general] are forgotten ten minutes after they’re dead.”
Edward Hopper
(1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker
1941 - 1967
Source: a letter to Margaret McKellar, 14 November 1965; as quoted in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984
H.L. Mencken
(1880–1956) American journalist and writer
204
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Context: The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money. No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
