Loss of Virtue Quotes

The spirit of ’76 is not dead, It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican .  But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, & made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves.

Once a country descends into evil, it doesn't emerge.

We know we are falling from grace, millennium.

An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.

The manly pride of the Romans, content with substantial power, had left to the vanity of the East the forms and ceremonies of ostentatious greatness. But when they lost even the semblance of those virtues which were derived from their ancient freedom, the simplicity of Roman manners was insensibly corrupted by the stately affectation of the courts of Asia.

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

Sin is the only real colour element left in modern life.

The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

… what our national experience has made plain is this, that to remain in a continually exalted moral condition is not human nature. That has happened which was prophesied: we have gone down hill from the Revolution until now; we are absorbed in "mere money-getting.

But when these [the previous generations] had departed out of this world, and a new generation succeeded, who were ignorant of this troublesome time, and had only experience of the present prosperity, all the laws of truth and justice were so shaken and subverted, that not so much as a vestige or remembrance of these virtues remained among the above-named orders of men, except among a very few

The conquer'd, also, and enslaved by war, Shall, with their freedom lost, all virtue lose.

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

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.