John Donne Quotes

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

The moral fiber of the American people is beset by rot and decay

All you got to do is look around. This country's getting worse and worse and more and more immoral, and we're rotting from within.

The Sick Rose O Rose, thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.

The bad guys don't always get punished and the good guys are not necessarily pure.

Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.

Once he became Pope Alexander VI, Vatican parties, already wild, grew wilder …. Guests stripped and ran out onto the floor, where they mounted, or were mounted by, the prostitutes. The coupling took place in front of everyone present …. The winners were those who made love with the courtesans the greatest number of times

Government is like an undershirt. If you don't change it frequently, it begins to stink.

... an apathetic indifferent meat in a sandwich that has an ever thinning slice of maniacal Plutocratic Gluttony on top and an ever thickening slice of rotten vermin rottening at the bottom.

The priests, either from indulgence or carelessness, have allowed the wicked to give loose reins to their lusts

Corruption has seeped into every section of life.

Decay and disease are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shellfish and the hectic glow of consumption.

Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption, also.

Jack, you've debauched my sloth.

The plague of gold strikes far and near.

But like infection is the petty thought: it creeps and hides, and wants to be nowhere--until the whole body is decayed and withered by the petty infection... Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.

There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.

When the juices of trees have no means of escape, they clot and rot in them, making the trees hollow and good for nothing.

So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.

Thus is the fruit of the Earth taken, its flesh torn. Thus is it given over standing, toward rot. It is the principle of corruption, the death of what is, the birth of what is to be. You are wine.

My love, do you recall the object which we saw, That fair, sweet, summer morn! At a turn in the path a foul carcass On a gravel strewn bed, Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman, Burning and dripping with poisons, Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way Its belly, swollen with gases.

Vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.