David Hume Quotes

Think'st thou there is no tyranny but that Of blood and chains? The despotism of vice-- The weakness and the wickedness of luxury-- The negligence--the apathy--the evils Of sensual sloth--produces ten thousand tyrants, Whose delegated cruelty surpasses The worst acts of one energetic master, However harsh and hard in his own bearing.

Over all, many of society's values are a cesspool.

No one who is in this world will deny that evils exist. What, then, do we say? That evil is not a living and animated substance, but a condition of the soul which is opposed to virtue and which springs up In the slothful because of their falling away from good.

So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born.

Comforts and syphilis are the greatest enemies of mankind.

We are not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other nations and peoples.

What is the cause of the great overflow of Vice in this age

Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.

Our religion is made to eradicate vices, instead it encourages them, covers them, and nurtures them.

There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterably dishonest that theft is to them a master passion.

The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal.

We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables.

How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!

IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.

When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands to be believed.

Every fresh act of sin lessens fear and remorse, hardens our hearts, blunts the edge of our conscience, and increases our evil inclination.

Lust is a sharp spur to vice, which always putteth the affections into a false gallop.

Civilization is a social plague on the planet, and vices are just as necessary to it as is a virus to disease.

Intemperance is a hydra with a hundred heads. She never stalks abroad unaccompanied with impurity, anger, and the most infamous profligacies.

The vicious count their years; virtuous, their acts.

Of course I am frustrated with regard to extreme poverty, to violence that never seems to cease. Greed is the key. It's easy to sit in relative luxury and peace and pontificate on the subject of the Third World debts. Not many of us are willing to give up everything we have. We can however give some, and millions of people do, governments do, but there is so much more to be done.

A woman who wants a charitable heart wants a pure mind.

There have certainly been many periods in history when virtue was more rare than under the Caesars; but there has probably never been a period when vice was more extravagant or uncontrolled.

The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.

Wealth and poverty; one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.