“It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment.”

— Eric Hoffer

"Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely'", The New York Times Magazine (April 25, 1971), p. 50.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor …" by Eric Hoffer?

Eric Hoffer240

American philosopher 1898–1983

Related quotes

“Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches, and getting involved in it only leads to misery and dissatisfaction.”

Charles Stross Saturn's Children

Source: Saturn's Children (2008), Chapter 9, “Coin-Operated Boy” (p. 157)

“The functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted — or rather tend to be corrupted — by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i. e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

Ch. 6 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch06.htm <br class="br">The State and Revolution (1917)

“One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.”

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) American novelist, writer, journalist, political activist

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

George Orwell book 1984

"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Source: 1984
Context: But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
Context: All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.