Life & Wisdom Quote by Morris West

West’s line refuses the comforting fantasy that “the system” is some pristine machine damaged only by a few bad apples. It flips that cliche: institutions don’t just contain people’s flaws; they metabolize them. The word “prone” is doing quiet, lethal work here. Corruption isn’t an accident or an aberration, it’s a built-in risk of any structure that concentrates power, routine, loyalty, and secrecy. West isn’t moralizing so much as diagnosing.

The subtext is almost ecclesiastical, which tracks with a novelist who spent so much ink on the Catholic Church and the politics of conscience. “Institutions” reads broad - governments, corporations, media, universities - but it also winks at bodies that claim a moral mandate. When an institution presents itself as a guardian of virtue, it attracts people who want that authority and provides the perfect cover for vice: the uniform, the mission statement, the sacrament of “for the greater good.”

“Vices of their members” is less about grand villains than about everyday human defaults: ambition, fear, tribalism, careerism, the desire to be protected from consequences. West implies that bureaucracies don’t erase those impulses; they formalize them, give them procedures, and reward them with plausible deniability. That’s why scandal so often arrives as paperwork.

Context matters: West wrote in a century scarred by world wars, Cold War realpolitik, and institutional revelations from churches to states. The intent isn’t nihilism; it’s a demand for vigilance. If corruption is predictable, then accountability can’t be an afterthought or a PR ritual. It has to be structural, continuous, and unromantic about human nature.