“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”
(This quote above is often misattributed to Cicero. It is actually by novelist Taylor Caldwell from a novel she wrote about Cicero. So, the words are put into Cicero's mouth by Caldwell. The occasion of the quote would have been the Catiline Conspiracy. It certainly sums up today's 'rats and their media.)
