“Power creates temptations, and that is true even for the smallest increments of power: the power of the building inspector, of the customs official, of the cop at the traffic stop. It took a lot of work by a lot of people over a long time to build even America’s highly imperfect standards of public integrity. Undoing that work would be a far easier task. Corruption is the resting state of pubic affairs; integrity a painstaking, unceasing struggle against cultural inertia and political gravity.”
