Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Bullock

Corruption, in Bullock's framing, isn't primarily about bribes, graft, or bureaucratic rot. It's about a moral slide so deep it turns people into something less than people. The sentence works because it yanks "corruption" out of the courtroom and drops it into the realm Bullock knew best: the 20th century's organized brutalities, where respectable institutions learned to speak fluent euphemism while doing monstrous things.

Bullock, a historian of Hitler and of modern political power, is allergic to the comforting idea that evil arrives as an obvious villain. His implicit target is the ordinary person who adapts. "To behave in an inhuman way" points to a process: cruelty becomes routine, cruelty becomes policy, cruelty becomes paperwork. The subtext is that corruption is not just a private vice but a social permission structure. Once a culture normalizes humiliation, scapegoating, or treating certain lives as disposable, the population has been corrupted even if the economy is thriving and the trains run on time.

The line also refuses the alibi of ideology. Inhuman behavior can wear any uniform, wave any flag, cite any necessity. Bullock's historian's pessimism is in the grammar: it's not "can be" inhuman, it's "is" corruption. That blunt equivalence warns against the incremental bargain - one small compromise, one shrugged-away injustice - by insisting that the real cost is anthropological. You don't just lose ethics; you lose your species membership in practice.