We are not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other nations and peoples.
Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.
Today we are afraid of simple words like goodness and mercy and kindness. We don't believe in the good old words because we don't believe in good old values anymore. And that's why the world is sick.
Over the past two decades, we have clearly seen an erosion of ethical values.
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.
Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality.
The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.
There's a lot to be done; I just see a total moral decay in our society.
A sign of a culture that has lost its faith - Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.
In the past, children learned their values at home, reinforced by organizations such as the Boy Scouts and, of course, their church or synagogue, but in all too many families that is no longer the case.
There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.
Bad art was as good as good art. Grammar and spelling were no longer important. To be clean was no better than to be filthy. Good manners were no better than bad. Family life was derided as an outdated bourgeois concept. Criminals deserved as much sympathy as their victims. Many homes and classrooms became disorderly - if there was neither right nor wrong there could be no basis for punishment or reward. Violence and soft pornography became accepted in the media. Thus was sown the wind, and we are now reaping the whirlwind.
Accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.
We do not increase compassion by expanding it to cover anything. Instead, we kill a good word by making it mean too much, and nothing.
For conservatives, the issue is that for generations now, they have failed to make the case for their values. They haven't even conveyed conservative values to many of their children. And when they have, the university has often succeeded in undoing them.
We just seem to have lost all our morals and principles and values these days.
The American people have no idea they are paying the bill. They know that someone is stealing their hubcaps, but they think it is the greedy businessman who raises prices or the selfish laborer who demands higher wages or the unworthy farmer who demands too much for his crop or the wealthy foreigner who bids up our prices. They do not realize that these groups also are victimized by a monetary system which is constantly being eroded in value by and through the Federal Reserve System.
The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.
Disregard for the consequences and for right and wrong nowadays passes as energy.
We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.
From the subtle to the extreme, our culture and our values are under unrelenting attack from the media.
You start like a white blanket and you have to preserve that, and each year that you live chips away at your essential value.
But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.
Those for whom words have lost their value are likely to find that ideas have also lost their value.
