Seneca the Younger Quotes

Only our own corruption can destroy us and cause our armed forces to be defeated without fighting.

Since being on television, I have felt that my brain is degenerating.

TV rots your brain.

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

Combinations of wickedness would overwhelm the world, by the advantage which licentious principles afford, did not those who have long practised perfidy grow faithless to each other.

If the world suffers from mental deterioration or from moral degradation, then something goes wrong at the very root of civilization or culture. Even though that civilization may drag out for a considerable period, it grows less and less vital and ultimately tumbles down.

When the thinking of a people becomes corrupt, the pure silver becomes impure in its hands.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

When one's character begins to fall under suspicion and disfavor, how swift, then, is the work of disintegration and destruction.

The mind grows narrow in proportion as the soul grows corrupt.

The use it and lose it problem is pervasive, affecting more than 40,000 Californians a year.

I am already sensible of decay in the power of walking, and find my memory not so faithful as it used to be. This may be partly owing to the incessant current of new matter flowing constantly through it; but I ascribe to years their share in it also.

Lying is a terrible vice, it testifies that one despises God, but fears men.

Hunger steals the memory

Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living, growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul. . . And the little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren't they like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?

Sin is like a cancer that destroys step by step, sometimes so slowly we don't realize what's happening to us.

The world is grown so bad, That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.

Weak minds may be injured by novel-reading; but sensible people find both amusement and instruction therein.

You will say these are very small sins... [But] it does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts

My memory - faded, as I say - is that Paul Johnson was trying to vilify all intellectuals who were at all critical of the states he worships, and of power generally (except, of course, the power of enemies, which we must denounce, imitating the commissars who are his models, though he doesn't understand it).

External objects produce decided effects upon the brain. A man shut up between four walls soon loses the power to associate words and ideas together. How many prisoners in solitary confinement become idiots, if not mad, for want of exercise for the thinking faculty!

Is America becoming decadent? Do we no longer regard our promises and pledges as sacred? ... We promised to make peace with Germany only in conjunction with the Allies; but we brought forward a separate peace, demanding for ourselves all the advantages of the Treaty of Versailles but rejecting all the responsibilities embodied in the Treaty. It was America's President who induced Europe to form a League of Nations; and then America was the first country that refused to joint it.... If these are not the symptoms of national decadency, what are they?

For what is there more hideous than avarice, more brutal than lust, more contemptible than cowardice, more base than stupidity and folly?

Man is not born wicked; he becomes so, as he becomes sick.

In North America, people get a sense that something is really wrong in government and in our culture. There is a corruption, not only in politics, but of spirit as well, when people are so quick to be violent with one another. I think everybody would like to be able to find a solution to make things better. We have the desire to reform inside of us, and we get frustrated because we don't know how to change things, even if it comes to our own behavior. Sometimes you get frustrated because you don't know how to stop that thing that you know is either hurtful to yourself or someone else.