Moral Decay Quotes

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

A government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.

We knew Chris Matthews had no shame. Now we also know the king of TV ghouls has no souls.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

The Mohammadan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

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

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

[Political] offices are as acceptable here as elsewhere, and whenever a man cast a longing eye on them, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

… perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS. Similarly in the past the Inquisition and the Jesuits adopted this motto and subordinated to it all morality. It avenged itself upon the Jesuits as it did upon the Russian Revolution. In the wake of this slogan followed lying, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery, murder, open and secret. It should be of utmost interest to students of social psychology that two movements as widely separated in time and ideas as Jesuitism and Bolshevism reached exactly similar results in the evolution of the principle that the end justifies all means. The historic parallel, almost entirely ignored so far, contains a most important lesson for all coming revolutions and for the whole future of mankind.

The commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts.

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

It is possible for great nations to rot from within.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

If you are strong, and you are fighting the weak for any period of time, you are going to become weak yourself. If you behave like a coward, then you are going to become cowardly - it's only a question of time.

Making an open stand against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness which overspreads our land as a flood is one of the noblest ways of confessing Christ in the face of His enemies.

All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Christianity, alcohol the two great means of corruption.

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.