Societal Rot Quotes

It is possible for great nations to rot from within.

Let's face it: the world is twisted. And rotten.

London! the needy villain's general home, The common sewer of Paris and of Rome! With eager thirst, by folly or by fate, Sucks in the dregs of each corrupted state.

Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean.

There will he nothing more that posterity can add to our immoral habits; our descendants must have the same desires and act the same follies as their sires. Every vice has reached its zenith.

Ultimately we must concern ourselves with pulling out by its roots the decadence that controls our culture, the profit motive that controls our culture.

I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them - the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.

The absence of hope can rot a society from within.

The moral state of society was most terrible. We stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in the reports, in newspapers, from high podiums. And all of this from top to bottom; from bottom to top.

It was worthwhile to come here only to see why Europe is rottening, why all this people - good for nothing - are the cause of all the Hitlers and Mussolinis.