Anthony Burgess Quotes

We, perhaps, have corrupted our children and our grandchildren by heedless affluence, by a lack of manliness, by giving the younger generation more money and liberty than their youth can handle, by indoctrinating them with sinister ideologies and false values, by permitting them, as young children, to indulge themselves in imprudence to superiors and defiance of duly constituted authority, by lack of prudent, swift punishment when the transgressed, by coddling and pampering them when they were children and protecting them from a very dangerous world.

If movies are causing moral decay, then crime ought to be going up, but crime is going down.

The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt.

Thousands of years of worshiping power has dealt a mortal wound to Chinese culture. That’s hypocrisy and falsehood. The habit of falsehood is fatal to a culture. But to us, falsehood is the essence.

More than Iran’s enemies need artillery, guns, and so forth, they need to spread cultural values that lead to moral corruption …. I recently read in the news that a senior official in an important American political center said “Instead of bombs, send them miniskirts”. He is right. If they arouse unrestrained mixing of men and women, and if they lead youth to behavior to which they are naturally inclined by instincts, there will no longer be any need for artillery and guns against that nation.

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!

A culture that does not aspire to the divine becomes obsessed with the fascination of evil, reveling in the frivolous, the depraved, and the bestial.

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.

American's greatest deficit is no longer found in the federal budget. It is a moral deficit, and it may be found in a polluted and poisoned culture that has become the great enemy within.

People with really weak characters cause an immense amount of suffering in the world. They destroy whole civilisations.

We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

At school boys become gluttons and slovens, and, instead of cultivating domestic affections, very early rush into the libertinism which destroys the constitution before it is formed; hardening the heart as it weakens the understanding.

Ultimately we must concern ourselves with pulling out by its roots the decadence that controls our culture, the profit motive that controls our culture.

We're in a decaying culture now. Naturally, the young people in the culture are going to feel themselves to be products of the decay.

What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.

The magnitude of this evil among us is so deeply felt, and so universally acknowledged, that no merit could be greater than that of devising a satisfactory remedy for it.

Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.

Are you grown an atheist? Will you turn your body, Which is the goodly palace of the soul, To the soul's slaughter-house? Oh, the curse' d devil, Which doth present us with all other sins Thrice-candied o'er.

The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion.

You could say that evil is contagious in that we have this mesmerizing mentor in Uncle Charlie who comes into your life. Every person has a seed of evil inside them, and when you come across such a mesmerizing mentor, he is able to successfully turn it into a flower of evil.

Greed stains our culture, soaks our sensibilities and has replaced grace as a sign of our intimacy with the divine.

This is the sin against the Holy Ghost: - To speak of bloody power as right divine, And call on God to guard each vile chief's house, And for such chiefs, turn men to wolves and swine.

I don't know what America has really learned. We are too quick to do what's expedient on behalf of our culture of greed and hedonism. We're quite prepared to go to conditions of tyranny in order to sustain that culture, and we do it in the name of democracy, when nothing could be more undemocratic. We do it in the name of saving the values of our society, when the way we behave corrupts those values. We do it in the name of God in whom we believe, when in fact we have corrupted our own vision of the Christian journey.

It wasn't so much all the sex that robbed me of my moral bearings, but all the narcotics. I must say, there's something about opium that goes very well with lesbianism.

The moral immune system of this country has been weakened and attacked, and the AIDS virus is the perfect metaphor for it. The malignant neglect of the last twelve years has led to breakdown of our country's immune system, environmentally, culturally, politically, spiritually and physically.