I’m not certain of the context of this Catch-22 (1961) quotation, but I stumbled across this on the internet the other day, and, boy, does it capture the shabbiness of some of our current politics.

Doing a little digging, it appears that 1) The quotation is real, and 2) It’s not a Yossarian (the novel’s protagonist) quotation.- it appears to be an unspoken conclusion reached by an Army chaplain, but I’m not certain.

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.