Moral Contagion Quotes

If only people would realize that moral principles are like measles.... They have to be caught. And only the people who've got them can pass on the contagion.

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.

Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.

There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

Even papists could not see that a moral evil was detained in the soul through its physical connection with the body; and that it required the dissolution of this physical connection before the moral contagion could be removed.

There are epidemics of nobleness as well as epidemics of disease.