Moral Corruption 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.

When I reflect on the pompous titles bestowed on unworthy men, I feel an indignity that instructs me to despise the absurdity. The Honourable plunderer of his country, or the Right Honourable murderer of mankind, create such a contrast of ideas as exhibit a monster rather than a man. Virtue is inflamed at the violation, and sober reason calls it nonsense.

He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity.

The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

… perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS. Similarly in the past the Inquisition and the Jesuits adopted this motto and subordinated to it all morality. It avenged itself upon the Jesuits as it did upon the Russian Revolution. In the wake of this slogan followed lying, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery, murder, open and secret. It should be of utmost interest to students of social psychology that two movements as widely separated in time and ideas as Jesuitism and Bolshevism reached exactly similar results in the evolution of the principle that the end justifies all means. The historic parallel, almost entirely ignored so far, contains a most important lesson for all coming revolutions and for the whole future of mankind.

I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.

It is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice. For they cannot live in any country where virtue and knowledge prevail. The religion and public liberty of a people are intimately connected; their interests are interwoven, they cannot subsist separately; and therefore they rise and fall together. For this reason, it is always observable, that those who are combin'd to destroy the people's liberties, practice every art to poison their morals.

When secularization has had its full sway, it will leave a generation devoid of shame. And if you show me a generation that lacks shame, I will show you a generation that is monstrous in its appetite... never satisfied.

Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this moral corruption; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one's own merits.

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

The wicked are always ungrateful.

A corrupt practice may be abolished, but a soiled imagination is not easily cleansed.

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

The act of evil breeds others to follow, young sins in its own likeness.

Where dance is, there is the devil.

Some of the defendants say that dictatorship can be good if there is a good dictator. But I say that a man cannot stay good if he becomes a dictator. Authoritarianism is a system that destroys man's morality. If you take a saint and give him power, he will change into a Hitler or a devil.

The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances... [Slavery]

These call themselves the Supreme Court? They're worthless. They should be put in a bottom court … for them [God] created all of the torments in the world. Everything that [the people of] Israel suffer from, is just for these evil people. Empty and reckless... What do they know? One of our children of 7–8 years knows better than they how to learn Torah. Who says that the nation wants such judges, such evil [ones]... They have no religion and no law. All of them have sex with Niddot. All of them desecrate the Sabbath.

Theirs is a Spartan morality. Not the corruption but the discovery that constitutes the crime. Instead of applauding the investigators, they make war on the investigation. Instead of condemning the exposed and praising the exposure, they praised the exposed and condemned the exposure

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason. There's also a negative side.

No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community.

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.