Thomas Bernhard Quotes

Nay, men are so far from musing of their sins, that they disdain this practise, and scoff at it: what say they, if all were of your mind; what should become of us? Shall we be always poring on our corruptions?

Nobody responds to being made to feel judged.

I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

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.

I think 'The Wire' is my all-time favorite TV show. It's so brilliant, the way it critiques society, and how it handles that everybody who gets power loses their moral code and stops going to the root of the problem and just tries to maintain their own power.

Where wealth accumulates, men decay.

It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

When you put on the suits, when you pretend you're honest and you're robbing at a far higher level, these guys deserve to... well, to be in my novels, and I have special fates reserved for them.

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

Often even a whole city suffers for a bad man who sins and contrives presumptuous deeds.

In Kurosawa's films, the tragedy is that this strong man was crushed by corruption or mistrust at the end.

The perception of the right of every man to do pretty much as he pleases…. [which will produce] a general profligacy and corruption such as this country has never known.

Knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its [America's] inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they become aliens to this Kingdom.

… a sewer with all the depravity of the human race.

What is the cause of the great overflow of Vice in this age

The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless.

As far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still is, incomparably more advanced than I. I knew nothing at that time of political economy, I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical observations... He called me a sentimental idealist and he was right; I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty, and I also was right.

Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Villainy that is vigilant will be an overmatch for virtue, if she slumber at her post.

At the rate America is decaying morally, we shall have to change our national symbol from an eagle to a vulture.

How wonderful to know someone who was bad and dishonorable and a cheat and a liar, when all the world was filled with people who would not lie to save their souls and who would rather starve than do a dishonorable deed!

We may form free constitutions, but our vices will destroy them; we may enact laws, but they will not protect us.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

The corruption of the age is made up by the particular contribution of every individual man; some contribute treachery, others injustice, atheism, tyranny, avarice, cruelty, according to their power.