William Bennett Quotes

Gleeful, unembarrassed ruthlessness, once rightly kept in check, has become normal among us, and 'Game Of Thrones' is a success because this change is now more or less complete.

Long, continuous periods of peace and prosperity have always brought about the physical, mental and moral deterioration of the individual.

There is a strong tendency to get used to and accept very bad things that would be shocking if seen with fresh eyes.

Here we are in the 70's when everything really is horrible and it really stinks. The mass media, everything on television everything everywhere is just rotten. You know it's just really boring and really evil, ugly and worse.

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 a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

It is the generation of the unemphatic. Steal, kill, lie, fornicate, but beware of indulging with conviction.

I've lost the ability to be surprised.

Nothing really shocks me anymore.

When I rather guiltily read the books on which the TV series 'Game Of Thrones' is based, I was struck by one thing. The whole point of this saga is that ruthlessness pays, that evil generally wins, that justice is non-existent, and utter cynicism the only wisdom. It is the Middle Ages without the saving grace of Christianity.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

But no one can blink at the fact that in this land, and in other lands across the world, there is an epidemic affecting the lives of millions of youth. It is a sickness that comes of a loss of values, of an abandonment of moral absolutes. The virus which has infected them comes of leaderless families, leaderless schools, leaderless communities. It comes of an attitude that says, "We will not teach moral values. We will leave the determination of such to the individual."

Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all virtues

We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor

We tolerate without rebuke the vices with which we have grown familiar.

I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.

it doesn't matter if Prince Charles falls off his horse or that the hummingbird is so seldom seen or that we are too senseless to go insane. coffee. give us more of that NOTHING coffee.

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

A society that is in its higher circles and middle levels widely believed to be a network of smart rackets does not produce men with an inner moral sense; a society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience. A society that narrows the meaning of 'success' to the big money and in its terms condemns failure as the chief vice, raising money to the plane of absolute value, will produce the sharp operator and the shady deal. Blessed are the cynical, for only they have what it takes to succeed.

Nothing surprises me. After Donald Trump, nothing matters, does it?

The so-called new morality is too often the old immorality condoned.

Famine and disaster, right there in front of you, and the more you watch, the less you do.

Let nothing dupe you! Such is the horrible maxim that acts as a solvent upon every noble feeling man experiences.

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.