Samuel Johnson Quotes

The giving way to a less sin makes way for the committing of a greater

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.

Most of the bad guys in the real world don't know that they are bad guys. You don't get a flashing warning sign that you're about to damn yourself. It sneaks up on you when you aren't looking.

This isn't a mob, won't need to change the names. Everyone around you has murdered someone, something sacred. There isn't one nail without dirt under it. There isn't any white cotton panties that aren't soaked and stained red. It's better to push something when it's slipping, than to risk being dragged down.

The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.

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.

To an age which has unashamedly sold itself to the gods of greed, pride, sex, and self-will, the church mumbles on about God's kindness but says virtually nothing about his judgment... The fact is that the subject of divine wrath has become taboo in modern society, and Christians by and large have accepted the taboo and conditioned themselves never to raise the matter.

We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent.

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

We strive as hard to hide our hearts from ourselves as from others, and always with more success; for in deciding upon our own case we are both judge, jury, and executioner, and where sophistry cannot overcome the first, or flattery the second, self-love is always ready to defeat the sentence by bribing the third.

Men rarely see their own actions as unjustified.

We are never more self-righteous than when giving up what we should have shunned all along.

The more bad choices you make, the less bad your choices seem.

Virtue debases itself in justifying itself.

When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed

A depraved culture supports a depraved politics and vice versa.

Man's sense of Morality tends to decrease as his Power increases

Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

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.

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.

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.