Richard M. Weaver Quotes

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

The profound immoralities of our time are cruelty, indifference, injustice and the use of others as means rather than ends in themselves.

Corrupt citizens breed corrupt rulers, and it is the mob who finally decides when virtue shall die.

Become corrupt, corrupt, and you will cease to suffer!" This has been the cry of all cities to man.

There is no more subtle dissolvent of morals than sentimentality.

In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.

A sturdy, hardened sinner shall advance to the utmost pitch of impiety, with less reluctance than he took the first step while his conscience was yet vigilant and tender.

We need not worry so much about what man descends from; it's what he descends to that shames the human race.

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

So often do you see collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink to sordid, selfish, shrewd plodders, full of distrust and sneers.

When nations are to perish in their sins, 'tis in the Church the leprosy begins.

Symptoms of ethical, political and economic impoverishment are all around us.

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.

DEGRADATION, n. One of the stages of moral and social progress from private station to political preferment.

The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.

The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

A depraved culture supports a depraved politics and vice versa.

There have certainly been many periods in history when virtue was more rare than under the Caesars; but there has probably never been a period when vice was more extravagant or uncontrolled.

When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, "Who is destroying the world?" You are.

A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity.

This is a fallen world. People lie, the truth gets distorted, and that's the way it is. What's for dinner ?

Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system. And because we have tolerated our past and present evils, international affairs are poisoned and law and justice have disappeared from them.

I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice - is often the means of their regeneration.

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.