Moral Fatigue Quotes

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.

Public outrage gets used up. You just move to a lower standard.

There is many a virtuous woman weary of her trade.

Make a habit of telling the truth, or make a habit of lying: to decide each case on its own merits is exhausting, and hardly ever worth it.

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

How sick one gets of being 'good', how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.

I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

She said, 'Believe it or not, I used to be idealistic.' I asked her what 'idealistic' meant. 'It means you live by what you think is right.' 'You don't do that anymore?' 'There are questions I don't ask anymore.

The righteous ones are always exhausting to have around.

It's much easier to get disgusted when you've already banked 20 million bucks.

Extraordinarily excessive sensuality it may be .. but it all comes down to the same thing in the end, and one means is surely as good as another, since the end obtained is always the same. In any case the exceptional, endlessly repeated, is no different than the banal; and unceasing recapitulation can add nothing, in the end, to the sum of experience. I am weary and hopeless three times the dupe. Why have you trained me in the shame of abominable sins?

Today, most Americans are too cynical, or tired, or both, to even approximate our Founders' courageous repudiation of injustice.

I'm really tired of virtue.

In my latter years I've decided that there's too much to keep track of when you go into the lying game. That becomes stressful and it's not for me anymore.

The influence of a woman can be very great, especially now, in the present order or disorder of society, in which there is a kind of spiritual chill, a kind of moral fatigue, demanding reanimation. In order to produce this reanimation, the cooperation of woman is indispensable.

Unbounded morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.