John Underwood Quotes

When I was reporting crime... I never had the sense of clockwork conspiracies or some kind of imposing order of evil. What I sensed was things just sort of falling apart.

There's such cultural rot taking place, such a disintegration throughout our culture. Values, morality, you name it. Standards have been relaxed, and people are not being held to them. People's intentions, if they're said to be good and honorable, that's all that matters.

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

Because of our sin, we as individuals and as a nation continue to experience a decline in moral values and beliefs. Our sinful behavior has resulted in increasing rates of unmarried adolescent and adult sexual activity, the birth of children to unwed mothers, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and decreasing marital fidelity. These are all signs of the decline of our culture.

An uncontrollable situation, in which there are no clearly defined spheres of authority, has come about in the country. Under these conditions, normal life is impossible.

There's a lot to be done; I just see a total moral decay in our society.

I don't think people understand the awesomeness of the destruction of this country - its institutions, its infrastructure, its law, its morals.

Example and general milieu, once considered so important in the nurture of children, are sacrificed on the altars of the false god we call free choice but which imprisons us all in a collective moral paralysis and delivers an anarchy that the State itself shrinks from challenging.

There are a lot of problems in this country having to do with permissiveness.

For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost- good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies anymore, and you couldn't trust a gentleman's word.

Bad art was as good as good art. Grammar and spelling were no longer important. To be clean was no better than to be filthy. Good manners were no better than bad. Family life was derided as an outdated bourgeois concept. Criminals deserved as much sympathy as their victims. Many homes and classrooms became disorderly - if there was neither right nor wrong there could be no basis for punishment or reward. Violence and soft pornography became accepted in the media. Thus was sown the wind, and we are now reaping the whirlwind.

Idleness leads to relaxation, sooner or later bringing about ideological and material corruption, accompanied by lack of discipline, anarchy chaos and defeat.

Violence is the most ubiquitous symptom of a disease spreading through our society—an epidemic of lawlessness which, unless checked in time, could prove fatal to democracy itself.

Well, this is the end of Western civilization.

The nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

I have arrived at only a few sure conclusions: 1. For us, (South) America is ungovernable. 2. He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea. 3. The only thing we can do in (South) America is emigrate. 4. This country will eventually fall into the hands of the unbridled mob, and will proceed to almost imperceptible petty tyrannies of all complexions and races. 5. Devoured as we are by every kind of crime and annhilated by ferocity Europeans will not go to the trouble of conquering us. 6. If it were possible for any part of the world to revert to primordial chaos, that would be (South) America’s final state.

Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction. A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for some time, but beyond a certain pitch, even the best constitution will be ineffectual, and slavery must ensue.

Simply eight young men … standing amidst the ruins of one administration with the foundation of another not yet laid …. No police were functioning through the country, no system of justice was operating, the wheels of the administration hung idle, battered out of recognition by the clash of rival jurisdictions.

Our secular culture is adrift in a sea of relativism, escapism, and self-indulgent inanities, with our media and entertainment elites leading the parade.

If cleverness has often been a sign of decadence throughout history, the attempt to be too clever by half is an even more reliable marker of cultural decline.

All you got to do is look around. This country's getting worse and worse and more and more immoral, and we're rotting from within.

The painful truth is that in its attempt to remain 'morally neutral,' Hollywood is causing us to raise a nation of cads and harlots... Thanks again, Sean Penn!

Civilization is going down the drain, and the sooner it does, the better.

Living in lawlessness gives you lawlessness.