Paul Sarbanes Quotes

Public opinion is a second conscience.

We have defined decency down.

The Capitol Building should have a sign saying, “Warning!! You are now Entering an Ethics-Free Zone!”

In any operation as large as that of the federal government there are always going to be anomalies, mistakes and peccadilloes. The trick is to incite so much public (or at least media) outrage about them that the government has eventually to cut its losses rather than risk continued political damage.

The world is governed much more by opinion than by laws. It is not the judgment of courts, but the moral judgment of individuals and masses of men, which is the wall of defense around property and life.

Evidence that has surfaced has cast a black cloud of distrust over our entire society. Our citizens do not know whom to believe, and many of them have concluded that all the processes of government have become so compromised that honest government has been rendered impossible.

… this is your finest hour. I thought you were just great and everybody I talk to feels the same way …, You know Ruth … thinks this is all a Communist plot, left wing and everything else

Watch lest prosperity destroy generosity.

I'm an old sinner. Nothing shocks me.

Homosexuality involves sexual acts most men consider not only immoral, but filthy. The reason public men rarely say aloud what most say privately is they are fearful of being branded 'bigots' by an intolerant liberal orthodoxy that holds, against all evidence and experience, that homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle.

Evil is dull, that is the worst of it.

The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.

People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed.

Every group, every system has a set of values and morals and when you get outside those, then the alarms ring. I was politically incorrect to 95% of the country; luckily my 5% had the bread to come see me.

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal.

As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.

Were the life of man prolonged, he would become such a proficient in villainy, that it would become necessary again to drown or to burn the world. Earth would become an hell; for future rewards when put off to a great distance, would cease to encourage, and future punishments to alarm.

When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.

Cheating gets easier every time it's done. It's only hard the first time, when one feels the sting of morality and the guilt of betraying someone's trust.

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.

Virtue is chok'd with foul ambition

I don't think most of my opinions, political or social, are so far outside of the mainstream that they'd cause massive outrage on a scale liable to provoke death threats or referrals to prosecutors for outraging public decency, so why worry?

Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.