Civil Society and Corruption
American journalist Michael Lewis has pointed out that modern Greek culture lacks any tradition of volunteerism and altruism and is afflicted by extraordinarily high levels of selfishness and corruption, which culminated in the present Greek government-debt crisis. Commentators both within and without Greece have attributed this critical flaw in Greek culture to the Ottoman Empire's brutal mismanagement of Ottoman Greece, in which individual survival became more important than societal stability, tax resistance became a form of patriotism, and property and commercial tax systems were left in shambles, thereby making it impossible for Greece to create an functional civil society or an efficient modern state.
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Famous quotes containing the words civil society, civil, society and/or corruption:
“The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state.... It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“A war between Europeans is a civil war.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“There couldn’t be a society of people who didn’t dream. They’d be dead in two weeks.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage; and this when used with calmness and deliberation will prove strong enough.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)