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.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Greece
Famous quotes containing the words civil, society and/or corruption:
“Luxury, or a refinement on the pleasures and conveniences of life, had long been supposed the source of every corruption in government, and the immediate cause of faction, sedition, civil wars, and the total loss of liberty. It was, therefore, universally regarded as a vice, and was an object of declamation to all satyrists, and severe moralists.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“I am ill, but your being by me
Cannot amend me; society is no comfort
To one not sociable. I am not very sick,
Since I can reason of it.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible accusation that any accuser has ever uttered. It is to me the ultimate conceivable corruption. It has possessed the will to the final corruption that is even possible. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity: it has turned every value into a disvalue, every truth into a falsehood, every integrity into a vileness of the soul.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)