Jane Austen Quotes

The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.

People think that human beings have gotten worse, that because of the pressures that modern society puts on us, we've gotten worse, and we've gotten capable of doing more terrible things. I don't know if I necessarily think that that's true.

Over the past two decades, we have clearly seen an erosion of ethical values.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

Too often on social issues my party has painted an image of America as slouching towards Gomorrah.

There are certain seasons in the course of human affairs, when Genius, Virtue, and Patriotism, seems to nod over the vices of the times.

As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.

With all our crime and all our immorality ... and about as much contentment and respose as a fresh-caged hyena, we go to tell the whole world: we are the only one with the right idea!

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

When the Way is lost there is virtue. When virtue is lost there is benevolence. When benevolence is lost there is righteousness. When righteousness is lost there are rituals.

New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.

I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manfuacturer's lobby. But I also believe that when a gangbanger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels someone disrespected him, we have a problem of morality. Not only do we need to punish that man for his crime, but we need to acknowledge that there's a hole in his heart, one that government programs alone may not be able to repair.

Fundamentally, the force that rules the world is conduct, whether it be moral or immoral. If it is moral, at least there may be hope for the world. If immoral, there is not only no hope, but no prospect of anything but destruction of all that has been accomplished during the last 5,000 years.

Our strength lies in spiritual concepts. It lies in public sensitivities to evil. Our greatest danger is not from invading armies. Our dangers are that we may commit suicide from within by complaisance with evil, or by public tolerance of scandalous behavior.

One of the key problems of the business world is that greed has become culturally acceptable.

It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.

The march of intellect is proceeding at quick time; and if its progress be not accompanied by a corresponding improvement in morals and religion, the faster it proceeds, with the more violence will you be hurried down the road to ruin.

Corruption hates what is not corrupt.

Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.

I would say that today, dishonesty is the rule, and honesty the exception. It could be, statistically, that more people are honest than dishonest, but the few that really control things are not honest, and that tips the balance.

The low level which commercial morality has reached in America is deplorable. We have humble God fearing Christian men among us who will stoop to do things for a million dollars that they ought not to be willing to do for less than 2 millions.