Simone Weil Quotes

The accumulation of numbers always augments in some measure moral corruptions, and the consequences to health of the various vices incident thereto, are well known.

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.

Vice is a creature of such hideous mien... that the more you see it the better you like it.

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.

He was afflicted by the thought that where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.

Criminals interest me, because they're driven by the same desires as we are, but they take these disastrous shortcuts and end up in a real mess.

Never will there be grief enough over the corruption of morals so extensively increasing and promoted by irreligious and obscene writings, theatrical spectacles and meretricious houses established almost everywhere; by other depraved arts and monstrous portents of every error disseminated in all directions; by the abominable impurities of all vices and crimes growing constantly and the deadly virus of unbelief and indifferentism spread far and wide; by contempt for ecclesiastical authority

… perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS. Similarly in the past the Inquisition and the Jesuits adopted this motto and subordinated to it all morality. It avenged itself upon the Jesuits as it did upon the Russian Revolution. In the wake of this slogan followed lying, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery, murder, open and secret. It should be of utmost interest to students of social psychology that two movements as widely separated in time and ideas as Jesuitism and Bolshevism reached exactly similar results in the evolution of the principle that the end justifies all means. The historic parallel, almost entirely ignored so far, contains a most important lesson for all coming revolutions and for the whole future of mankind.

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

I have so great a contempt and detestation for meanness, that I could sooner make a friend of one who had committed murder, than of a person who could be capable, in any instance, of the former vice. Under meanness, I comprehend dishonesty; under dishonesty, ingratitude; under ingratitude, irreligion; and under this latter, every species of vice and immorality in human nature.

Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.

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.

Let's face it: the world is twisted. And rotten.

Our religion is made to eradicate vices, instead it encourages them, covers them, and nurtures them.

No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.

Vice is its own reward.

Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty; it withers the powers of his under- standing, and makes his mind paralytic.

Other vices make their own way; this makes way for all vices. He that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.

Once you start doing something bad, then it's easy to take the next step - and in the end, you're a moral sewer.

The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.

Divorce is born of perverted morals and leads to vicious habits.

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

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

Oh, what a vileness human beauty is; corroding, corrupting everything it touches.