Geoffrey Chaucer Quotes

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

Hypocrisy is a fearful evil, and every thing which has a tendency to produce it should be avoided.

The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances... [Slavery]

Whoever climbed the Lord's mountain had to possess clean hands and an innocent heart; otherwise the Summit would kill him. Today the doorway is deserted. Soiled hands and sinful hearts are able to pass by without fear, for the Summit kills no longer.

The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.

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

What use of oaths, of promise, or of test, where men regard no God but interest?

A legal broom's a moral chimney-sweeper, And that's the reason he himself's so dirty

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.

No power can be maintained when it is only represented by hypocrites.

I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.

Soul's Castle fell at one blast of temptation, But many a worm had pierced the foundation.

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

Lying eats into the soul. If it becomes a habit it frays the edge of your spirit. Truth telling, although sometimes harder to do, strengthens your heart. It serves a person ill not to tell the truth.

When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed

A depraved culture supports a depraved politics and vice versa.

The examples of vice at home corrupt us more quickly and easily than others, since they steal into our minds under the highest authority.

Shun, as you would the plague, a cleric who from being poor has become wealthy, or who, from being nobody has become a celebrity.

I would say that today, dishonesty is the rule, and honesty the exception. It could be, statistically, that more people are honest than dishonest, but the few that really control things are not honest, and that tips the balance.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.

Selfishness is the root of great evil.

Of all things in the world that stink in the nostrils of men, hypocrisy is the worst.

If gold rusts, what then can iron do?