Ethical Decay Quotes

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

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.

Nothing so evil as money ever grew to be current among men. This lays cities low, this drives men from their homes, this trains and warps honest souls till they set themselves to works of shame; this still teaches folk to practise villainies, and to know every godless deed. But all the men who wrought this thing for hire have made it sure that, soon or late, they shall pay the price.

Slavery is a slow poison to the morals of any community where it exists.

Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

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

The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.

Where the roots of private virtue are diseased, the fruit of public probity cannot but be corrupt.

The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior.

The moral fiber of the American people is beset by rot and decay

Shame is the dying embers of virtue.

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I've regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.

When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands to be believed.

People drift from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes thinkable as the years move on.

No one every suddenly became depraved.

I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year. Scout

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.

The downfall of every civilization comes, not from the moral corruption of the common man, but rather from the moral complacency of common men in high places.

No one ever became thoroughly bad in one step.

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

The wickedness of the few makes the calamity of the many.

How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!

Virtue is chok'd with foul ambition

Successful crime is dignified with the name of virtue; the good become the slaves of the wicked; might makes right; fear silences the power of the law.