Felix Frankfurter Quotes

If you allow young folk to be abominably brought up and their characters corrupted little by little, from childhood; and if then you punish them as grown-ups for committing the crimes to which their training has consistently inclined them, what else is this, I ask, but first making thieves and then punishing them for it?

One big vice in a man is apt to keep out a great many smaller ones.

We are all afflicted by original sin; people succumbing to temptations to do and to be.

But when to sin our biased nature leans, The careful Devil is still at hand with means; And providently pimps for ill desires.

Oh, what a wicked world it is that drives a man to sin.

Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.

Oh, this base heart of ours! Hath it not enough tinder in it to set on fire the course of nature? If a spark do but fall into it, any one of our members left to itself would dishonour Christ, deny the Lord that bought us, and turn back into perdition.

All things can corrupt when minds are prone to evil.

It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss in all things good; but in all things bad getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weakness and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than history.

Vice cannot be removed completely, nor is it right that it should be removed.

No one is above temptation. No one is above life in general.

Everybody has a sinful nature pulling them at every turn.

Sin and the devil will always find helpers in our hearts.

There's a basic human weakness inherent in all people which tempts them to bitterly want what they can't have and ungratefully not want what is readily available to them.

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

I don't think human beings are bad. They're weak. And that's what makes 'em bad.

Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.

Temptation does not make the sin, it lies ready in the heart.

There, pride, avarice, and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of depsair

Error is to be pitied and pardoned: it is the weakness of human nature. But vice is a foul blemish, not pardonable in any character.

Of all the causes which conspire to blind Man's erring judgement, and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is PRIDE, the never-failing vice of fools.

Man is oftentimes weak-minded enough to be caught in the snare of greed and honeyed words.