Theodore Dalrymple Quotes

Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.

Vice is a peripatetic, always in progression.

The world is increasing in wickedness.

It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss in all things good; but in all things bad getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of.

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.

The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.

... a moral skunk .... [who has] debauched America ...

Hypocrisy is a fearful evil, and every thing which has a tendency to produce it should be avoided.

Never will there be grief enough over the corruption of morals so extensively increasing and promoted by irreligious and obscene writings, theatrical spectacles and meretricious houses established almost everywhere; by other depraved arts and monstrous portents of every error disseminated in all directions; by the abominable impurities of all vices and crimes growing constantly and the deadly virus of unbelief and indifferentism spread far and wide; by contempt for ecclesiastical authority

Gambling was carried on extensively, and the saloons were full... mostly every one seemed bent on debauchery and dissipation... There appears to be plenty of money here, and plenty of fools to squander it... I verily believe that there are men here who would murder a fellow-creature for five dollars...

… the most depraved wretches on earth.

Everywhere we are surrounded by dogs and sorcerers and whores and the Godless and all who love lies and commit them.

He that's ungrateful has no guilt but one; All other crimes may pass for virtues in him.

No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.

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.

Vice is its own reward.

A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.

Other vices make their own way; this makes way for all vices. He that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.

In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.

Vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

Sordid and infamous sensuality, the most dreadful evil that issued from the box of Pandora, corrupts every heart, and eradicates every virtue. Fly! wherefore dost thou linger? Fly, cast not one look behind thee; nor let even thy thought return to the accursed evil for a moment.

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.

It's the lack of humanity in the human psyche that haunts me. The hypocrisy. How people as a group can take something like tolerance and contort it into a new form of intolerance and conformity. The way humanity can justify any kind of evil.