Emil Cioran Quotes

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.

The devil comes in many guises-anger in the form of justice-passion in the form of duty. When it first comes, the man knows and then he forgets. Just as your pleaders' conscience; at first they know it is all Badmashi (roguery), then it is duty to their clients; at last they get hardened.

Most people who get into power in the western world start with great intentions, but slowly they all become entrapped and hung by their own petard.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

All great nations inevitably end up committing suicide.

Journalists grow accustomed to seeing evil and they let it pass; they proceed to approve it, and they end by committing it themselves.

There are indeed, in the present corruption of mankind, many incitements to forsake truth: the need of palliating our own faults and the convenience of imposing on the ignorance or credulity of others so frequently occur; so many immediate evils are

... it matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death.

Become corrupt, corrupt, and you will cease to suffer!" This has been the cry of all cities to man.

I can say, particularly as a mother of four small children. I can talk about the coarsening of our culture.

There is no more subtle dissolvent of morals than sentimentality.

What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities.

We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor

This isn't a mob, won't need to change the names. Everyone around you has murdered someone, something sacred. There isn't one nail without dirt under it. There isn't any white cotton panties that aren't soaked and stained red. It's better to push something when it's slipping, than to risk being dragged down.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.

America is laughing her way to Hell.

If the world suffers from mental deterioration or from moral degradation, then something goes wrong at the very root of civilization or culture. Even though that civilization may drag out for a considerable period, it grows less and less vital and ultimately tumbles down.

The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.

Greed can be very dangerous because you sacrifice your soul for the sake of something material, and then you start sacrificing people in order to keep that which is material.

If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.