Walter Raleigh Quotes

Only our own corruption can destroy us and cause our armed forces to be defeated without fighting.

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

Other sins find their vent in the accomplishment of evil deeds, whereas pride lies in wait for good deeds, to destroy them.

Success achieved by the most contemptible means cannot but destroy the soul. ... It helps to cover up the inner corruption and gradually dulls one's scruples, so that those who begin with some high ambition cannot, even if they would, create anything out of themselves.

Before crime is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this.

[F]alsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

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.

Combinations of wickedness would overwhelm the world, by the advantage which licentious principles afford, did not those who have long practised perfidy grow faithless to each other.

Avalanches of evil begin with a single pebble of sin.

. . . if gold rust, what then will iron do?/ For if a priest be foul in whom we trust/ No wonder that a common man should rust. . . .

At the rate America is decaying morally, we shall have to change our national symbol from an eagle to a vulture.

No one every suddenly became depraved.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait)

When a religion or ideology becomes dominant, the lack of controls will result in widening spirals of license leading to degradation and corruption.

Human beings as a whole cannot be good for long before the bad creeps back in and poisons us again.

At length corruption, like a general flood (So long by watchful ministers withstood), Shall deluge all; and avarice, creeping on, Spread like a low-born mist, and blot the sun.

Selfishness is much more than an ordinary problem because it activates all the cardinal sins! It is the detonator in the breaking of the Ten Commandments.

There is something in corruption which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon, and sees everything stained and impure.

How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.

Even a little untruth destroys a man, as a drop of poison ruins milk.

Good never come of such evil, a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a beginning.

Time indeed changes manners and notions, and so far we must expect institutions to bend to them. But time produces also corruption of principles, and against this it is the duty of good citizens to be ever on the watch, and if the gangrene is to prevail at last, let the day be kept off as long as possible.

Rome has betrayed itself. It knew the truth and chose violence, it knew humaneness and it chose tyranny.

Fattened in vice, so callous and so gross, he sins and sees not, senseless of his loss.