Ethical Erosion Quotes

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

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.

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.

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

Very rarely do people make big compromises with their integrity. Almost every compromise is a small one that is easily justified. The downhill slide is usually a result of many little compromises.

We are in a crisis of political comportment. We are witnessing the rise of the classless. Our politicians are becoming degenerate. This has been happening for a while but gets worse as the country coarsens. We are defining deviancy ever downward.

Two evils, greed and faction are the destruction of all justice.

Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.

As soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And ... the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified — still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.

I worry about America. For the first time in my lifetime, I'm worried about us, i'm worried about how our values to some degree have been eroded, of personal responsibility and compassion and teamwork. I worry about it, I worry about the fact that we're so divided.

Every fresh act of sin lessens fear and remorse, hardens our hearts, blunts the edge of our conscience, and increases our evil inclination.

Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms.

The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.

The tolerance of wrong dulls our sense of its injustice. Men may become accustomed to theft, murder, even to slavery - that sum of all villainies - so they see no injustice in it, yet that which is unjust is unjust still.

Shame is the dying embers of virtue.

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

Corrupt citizens breed corrupt rulers, and it is the mob who finally decides when virtue shall die.

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.

We have defined decency down.

There are indeed, in the present corruption of mankind, many incitements to forsake truth: the need of palliating our own faults and the convenience of imposing on the ignorance or credulity of others so frequently occur; so many immediate evils are

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

Then no rightful cause was left, and the pain of anger was turning into the shameful pain of submission. He had no right to condemn anyone - he thought - to denounce anything, to fight and die joyously, claiming the sanctity of virtue. The broken promises, the unconfessed desires, the betrayal, the deceit, the lies, the fraud - he was guilty of them all. What form of corruption could he scorn? Degrees do not matter, he thought; one does not bargain about inches of evil.

Criminality is now legal. I guess criminal racketeering these days would be like burning little children at the stake or something. That's about what it takes to get anyone to care.

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

The evil works from a bad center both ways. It demoralizes those who practice it and destroys the faith of those who suffer by it in the efficiency of the law as a safe protector