"In this administration, a place can be found for every bad man"
About this Quote
A government that can "find a place" for "every bad man" isn’t merely corrupt; it’s hospitable to corruption, as if vice were a credential and public office a kind of sanctuary. Curran’s line lands because it weaponizes the bland language of administration against itself. "A place can be found" sounds like routine staffing, the soft bureaucratic voice of practicality. He turns that procedural calm into an indictment: this is not an occasional lapse, but a system engineered to absorb and reward the worst people.
The subtext is sharper than a simple moral complaint. Curran suggests a perverse meritocracy in which loyalty, shamelessness, or capacity for dirty work becomes the skillset most in demand. "Every" is doing real work: it implies not a few rotten appointments but an institutional appetite, an organization with enough niches for every species of scoundrel. The joke is grimly logistical. If everyone bad can be placed, the administration must be sprawling in patronage and shameless in its hiring math.
Context matters. Curran, an Irish lawyer and parliamentarian in the age of British rule and Irish agitation, spoke in a political culture thick with patronage, sinecures, and the buying of influence. His target wasn’t an abstract human failing; it was a recognizable machine where positions existed to manage factions and maintain power. The line works because it frames that machine as competent at only one thing: efficiently laundering disgrace into respectability via office. It’s a compact, devastating portrait of a state that doesn’t merely tolerate bad actors - it needs them.
The subtext is sharper than a simple moral complaint. Curran suggests a perverse meritocracy in which loyalty, shamelessness, or capacity for dirty work becomes the skillset most in demand. "Every" is doing real work: it implies not a few rotten appointments but an institutional appetite, an organization with enough niches for every species of scoundrel. The joke is grimly logistical. If everyone bad can be placed, the administration must be sprawling in patronage and shameless in its hiring math.
Context matters. Curran, an Irish lawyer and parliamentarian in the age of British rule and Irish agitation, spoke in a political culture thick with patronage, sinecures, and the buying of influence. His target wasn’t an abstract human failing; it was a recognizable machine where positions existed to manage factions and maintain power. The line works because it frames that machine as competent at only one thing: efficiently laundering disgrace into respectability via office. It’s a compact, devastating portrait of a state that doesn’t merely tolerate bad actors - it needs them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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