Depravity Quotes

THE VEIL OF CIVILISATION was thin indeed, so easily torn away to reveal depravity waiting beneath, waiting, as such things always did, for the first hint of turbulence. ~ Steven Erikson

We are shocked by thieves taking pride in their clever touch, prostitutes in their depravity and murderers in their callousness. But it is shocking only because the atmosphere of the circles they move in is restricted, and - what matters most - we are on the outside. But isn't the same thing happening when rich men take pride in their wealth (which is theft), military commanders in their victories (which are murder) and rulers in their power (which is violence)? We do not see them as people who corrupt the concept of life, or good and evil, in order to justify their own situation, but only because the circles of people who share these corrupt concepts are wider, and we belong to them. ~ Leo Tolstoy

For all the heartache, pain, and suffering. The grief and the torture. The hatred and the depravity. The abuse and the isolation. For all of the negativity and darkness this cruel world has to offer. Sometimes, just sometimes, the clouds part, the sun shines, and life reminds you why it's good to be alive. ~ A.J. Compton

It's true. Goodfellow is monogamous. he's become a freak. A pervert. Depravity on the cloven hoof."
"Or his balls fell off," suggested another puck who came to the bar. "Or his dick. Anyone who would hang out with Bacchus is bound to get a catastrophic genital rotting illness at some point. ~ Rob Thurman

One is not necessarily made self-centered because he is foolish, but one is very often made foolish because he is self-centered. ~ Criss Jami

We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below. ~ Karl Barth

Just because two men live together, it doesn't mean it's depravity. ~ Gordon Merrick

Even the respectable have a small anarchist hidden on the inside. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people ~ Wendell Phillips

Poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked the final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission. ~ Philip Zaleski

While the culture is constantly focused on fluff and positivity, God's Word offers not just a competing worldview but a contrary one. The Bible is not some retouched photo of the human condition, sanitized to save everyone the heartache of reality. The Bible brings far more than a smiley preacher with platitudes that fade before sunset. The Scriptures bring stark reality, the depravity of the human heart apart from God. His Word declares the dangers of sin using the lives of men and women who needed a front-row seat to learn that all sin brings suffering. These real people are not presented to us as perfect but as those whom God was working on. ~ James MacDonald

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. ~ Umberto Eco

I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible of all accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worse possible corruption. The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Lieutenant al-Kaseasbeh's dedication, courage and service to his country and family represent universal human values that stand in opposition to the cowardice and depravity of ISIL, which has been so broadly rejected around the globe. ~ Barack Obama

In Truth, none seem to have any Title to assert Human Nature to be necessarily and universally evil, but those whose own Minds afford them one Instance of this natural Depravity. ~ Henry Fielding

Men, your primary responsibility in your home, after your wife, is you to disciple your own children. And if you don't do it, you're in sin; you are in sin. And if you turn it over to a Sunday school teacher, you are in sin. And you are to be teaching these children more than just stories about animals that went into Noah's ark. You're to be teaching them about God, about radical depravity, about blood atonement, about propitiation, expiation, justification, sanctification; you are to teach your children! ~ Paul Washer

I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting
the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun. ~ Wendell Berry

The Russian people were just like us. They were victims of their own government. Ronald Reagan ~ Chris Matthews

Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation. ~ Samuel Johnson

Our insight into the need of redemption will largely depend upon our knowledge of the terrible nature of the power that has entered our being. ~ Andrew Murray

There is no such thing as a bottomless pit. If it were bottomless, it would not be a pit. The only thing that comes close to being a bottomless pit is the intrinsic depravity of mankind. ~ Ron Brackin

It is of interest to note that most secular humanists continue to belabor the horrors of the Inquisition in order to establish the moral depravity of Christianity. ~ Guenter Lewy

Our senses, our appetites, and our passions, are our lawful and faithful guides, in most things that relate solely to this life; and, therefore, by the hourly necessity of consulting them, we gradually sink into an implicit submission, and habitual confidence. Every act of compliance with their motions facilitates a second compliance, every new step towards depravity is made with less reluctance than the former, and thus the descent to life merely sensual is perpetually accelerated. ~ Samuel Johnson

1. The face tears up from laughter, and there is not flesh and soul, but a continuous smile of awareness.
2. A ghost is a hologram record of the projection of the universe, once generated by an accident of chaos, living in reality. This spirit is like the same memoirs and nostalgia of the past. This is a retro record of bygone times, traveling in empty eternity and nonsense, feeling only insensibility. A time-space film of time and space existing in time, in the depressing eternity of reality, in the void of consciousness of loneliness. A ghost who sees is not evolutionary progress, but the life cycle of a temporary transformation, rotting from the depravity of people.
3. Loneliness is a catcher of erotic dreams.
4. Careerism is a children's entertainment, attraction mini-golf of self-motivation and discipline.
5. Death from the dust of all the dead and dust of memories. Fear is all out of the darkness of the subconscious of billions of threads of manipulation.
6. Love relationships as a table hockey attraction, and the puck is the fault.
7. Laziness as an attraction a children's rocking chair is an illusion of movement.
8. The idea appeared in a mirror maze and it is reflected in all the mirrors, that is, the opinion that the source cannot be found because it is hidden from your eyes. You see that opinion is a sect. ~ Musin Almat Zhumabekovich

I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose
accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my
fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man
shall be myself.

I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I
have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not
better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely in
breaking the mould with which she formed me, can only be determined after
having read this work.

Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the
sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have
I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and
veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no
crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous
ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory:
I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but
have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I
have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous,
generous and sublime; even as thou hast read my inmost soul: Power
eternal! assemble round thy throne an innumerable throng of my
fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my
depravity, ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Atheism will appeal to psychology and sociology to explain human behavior, which is legitimate, but what explains human psychology? Atheism can only find explanatory power in evolution such that the mind is - paradoxically - a mindless organ that is forced to act according to its chemistry and cannot act otherwise.
The fact that humans are capable of recognizing depravity in others, are offended by it, seek to reform it, feel guilt, and are capable of redemptive behavior all speak against this explanation.
The fact that humans are capable of meta-cognition - thinking about thinking - and are therefore able to postulate their own mindlessness is counter-intuitive to say the least. ~ Joel Furches

My guess was that when you descended to a certain depth of depravity, the Fogs could smell you as a hound, catching a murderer's spoor, could track the criminal through forest, field, and moor. ~ Dean Koontz

A gospel that not only saves but serves. A gospel that not only saves but seeks to restore all things back unto the One that ushered forth all that is good and beautiful; A gospel that not only saves but ushers in the kingdom of God; A gospel that not only saves but restores the dignity of humanity-even in the midst of our brokenness and depravity. ~ Eugene Cho

To me there's only one form of human depravity-the man without a purpose. ~ Ayn Rand

Actually, depravity can be terribly boring if you don't smoke or drink. ~ Audrey Hepburn

Knowing God without knowing our wretchedness leads to pride. Knowing our wretchedness without knowing God leads to despair. Knowing Jesus Christ is the middle course, because in him we find both God and our wretchedness. ~ Blaise Pascal

Beside himself with shame and despair, the utterly ruined though perfectly just Mr. Golyadkin dashed headlong away, wherever fate might lead him; but with every step he took, with every thud of his foot on the granite of the pavement, there leapt up as though out of the earth a Mr. Golyadkin precisely the same, perfectly alike, and of a revolting depravity of heart. And all these precisely similar Golyadkins set to running after one another as soon as they appeared, and stretched in a long chain like a file of geese, hobbling after the real Mr. Golyadkin, so there was nowhere to escape from these duplicates - so that Mr. Golyadkin, who was in every way deserving of compassion, was breathless with terror; so that at last a terrible multitude of duplicates had sprung into being; so that the whole town was obstructed at last by duplicate Golyadkins, and the police officer, seeing such a breach of decorum, was obliged to seize all these duplicates by the collar and to put them into the watch-house, which happened to be beside him . . . Numb and chill with horror, our hero woke up, and numb and chill with horror felt that his waking state was hardly more cheerful . . . It was oppressive and harrowing . . . He was overcome by such anguish that it seemed as though some one were gnawing at his heart. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Charm's a very dangerous thing. Lucien, tell me," Stephen said thoughtfully. "This respect for shamans, this inviolability ... "
"Mmm?"
"Well, I don't know if you remember, but some three weeks ago, you tied me to your bedposts and spent two hours subjecting me to acts of unimaginable depravity. And considering you call me a shaman
"
"I take issue with 'unimaginable'," Crane interrupted, sudden heat and light rushing through him. "I imagine those acts in detail every night you're not there. In fact, I've imagined quite a few more that I have every intention of subjecting you to when I get a chance. ~ K.J. Charles

Sin has sprung from a royal though evil stock, and if it be in the heart, it will struggle for the throne. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Depravity and decadence are two sides of the same coin. ~ Manoj Vaz

How a human being could have attempted such a book [Wuthering Heights] as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors. ~ George R. Graham

The gospel proclaims human freedom and dignity more than human enslavement and depravity. What is needed is a balance of biblical values and emphasis on the empowering quality of the gospel. The spiritual values of humility, long suffering, endurance, and obedience are to be affirmed alongside self-reliance, freedom, proclamation, mission, and authority. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

Middle-earth, in other words, is a hauntingly luminous mirror image of our world. For we know that the world in which we live is a perilous place, a place where good and bad, light and dark, innocence and horror, glory and depravity march side by side and sleep back-to-back. ~ Kurt Bruner

The vampire could woo any woman with his charisma and his charm, but he only wishes to romance her.. for eternity. ~ Mr. Depravity

Original Sin has great marketing potential. ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

Thou hast gone on in all thy life hitherto, ever since thou wast born, in a continual opposition to God Himself, unto the infinite Lord, the eternal first being of all the world; thy life hath been nothing but enmity to this God: thou hast as directly opposed, and striven against, and resisted Him, as ever man did oppose, and resist, and strive with another man, and this thou hast done in the whole course of thy life: certainly there is more in this to humble a man than anything that can be spoken to shew him the evil of sin. ~ Jeremiah Burroughs

When virtue has slept, it will arise again all the fresher. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When he really wanted to get juicy, he would write in Latin. Remember? I was seventeen before I realised that immissio penis in os meant sticking it in the mouth."
"And immissio penis in anum, those who practiced that, he called us moral imbeciles and moral depravities, certain barbarous races devoid of morality. I grew up in constant fear! ~ Larry Kramer

To read of human depravity in the police reports is one thing, to see it fall like a black shadow across one's life is another. ~ William John Locke

A small knowledge of human nature will convince us, that, with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle ... Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the common good. It is vain to exclaim against the depravity of human nature on this account; the fact is so, the experience of every age and nation has proved it and we must in a great measure, change the constitution of man, before we can make it otherwise. No institution, not built on the presumptive truth of these maxims can succeed. ~ George Washington

It's not what people do that scares me. It's what they hide. It's the secrets that keep us from bonding and create distrust. If we were more willing to accept each other's depravity we'd be more united, we'd be more honest. If you hide two things from me, I'll assume you're hiding a million. And I'll keep you at a distance. I'm not afraid of the evil in you. It's in me too. ~ Donald Miller

We do not have any respect, let alone reverence, for the world of nature because we do not have any respect, let alone reverence, for ourselves. It is because we cripple and mutilate ourselves that we cripple and mutilate everything else as well. Our contemporary crisis is really our own depravity writ large. ~ Philip Sherrard

We stand on no high moral plateau in our time. We are, in fact, plumbing depths of depravity unknown to our ancestors
and whatever may have been the evil in which they engaged, at least they were willing to acknowledge the principle by which their evil was condemned. We have even turned our back on the principle. ~ Alan Keyes

There comes a time when everyone should seriously empathise.
Wikipedia defines empathy as "the capacity to recognise feelings that are being experienced by another sentient or semi-sentient being". Empathy is a prerequisite for experiencing compassion, and compassion is precisely what this world is most in need of. It's the crucial emotion required to help free the world from the thralls of depravity in which it finds itself ensnared ~ Mango Wodzak

Boasting about badness without actively involving in badness is mere madness. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Lord, lead me not into temptation, and when there leave me not there; for unless thou hold me fast I feel I must, I shall decline, and prove an apostate after all. There is enough tinder in the hearts of the best men in the world to light a fire that shall burn to the lowest hell, unless God should quench the sparks as they fall. There is enough corruption, depravity, and wickedness in the heart of the most holy man that is now alive to damn his soul to all eternity, if free and sovereign grace does not prevent. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Everyone thinks to the extent of their own depravity," #HenriettaLedyanova , #FatefulItalianPassion . ~ Olga Goa

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality ~ Harold Bloom

Only the human monster knew beauty and rejected it, knew truth and disdained it, knew peace and did not prefer it, unlike the tiger and the wolf who knew not. ~ Dean Koontz

There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one's own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage alone a foul, tortured path – made foul and tortured by our own indifference – is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come.

I defy this notion of paradise beyond the gates of bone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us – each of us, my friends – to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in the squandering of our mortal existence, we surrender the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing – all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve. ~ Steven Erikson

We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some hideous wallpaper we have lived with for years. ~ Roger Kimball

To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great? ~ Ayn Rand

To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity. ~ Yann Martel

When I was growing up there, North Gulfport was referred to as 'Little Vietnam' because of the perception of crime and depravity within its borders - as if its denizens were simply a congregation of the downtrodden. ~ Natasha Trethewey

Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Seek comfort in the warmth of the morality of your choosing. Not in the depravity and fear of lost causes, in which you should turn away, before it sees you, as well.

- Plight, 2015 ~ Don Swann II

I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence stillborn there. To understand this you have to become this. ~ Kenneth Cain

One with God is always a majority. But many have been burned at the stake while the boats were being counted. Thomas Reed ~ H.W. Brands

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil ... Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge. ~ Richard M. Weaver

Sin is the native language in every ZIP code. ~ Matt Chandler

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

We're walking around in it. We're in the sky. There is sky and there is ground and we're somewhere in between. That is where we live. And sometimes some of us take wing and when they do, when their feet leave the ground, even for a second, they pull the rest of us with them. And when we rise, and when we rise, and when we notice that the sky has been around us all along. We have been walking into it. It has been this constant collision. Divinity and depravity. And we rise and we rise and we rise and we rise and we rise and we rise and we rise and we rise and we rise and we rise and we rise and we rise and we rise and we rise... ~ David Crowder

Edward turned to Miss Marple. "It's like this, you see. As Uncle Mathew grew older, he got more and more suspicious. He didn't trust anybody." "Very wise of him," said Miss Marple. "The depravity of human nature is unbelievable. ~ Agatha Christie

The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything. ~ Richard Rohr

He felt crazy sometimes. Real depravity. Late at night an electric sizzle came into his blood, a tight pumped-up killing rage, and he couldn't keep it in and he couldn't let it out. He wanted to hurt things. Grab a knife and start cutting and slashing and never stop. All those years. Climbing like a son of a bitch, clawing his way up inch by fucking inch, and then it all came crashing down at once. ~ Tim O'Brien

Nevertheless, let no one boast. Just as every man, though he be the greatest genius, has very definite limitations in some one sphere of knowledge, and thus attests his common origin with the essentially perverse and stupid mass of mankind, so also has every man something in his nature which is positively evil. Even the best, nay the noblest, character will sometimes surprise us by isolated traits of depravity; as though it were to acknowledge his kinship with the human race, in which villainy
nay, cruelty
is to be found in that degree. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The blessed Religion revealed in the word of God will remain an eternal and awful monument to prove that the best Institution may be abused by human depravity; and that they may even, in some instances be made subservient to the vilest purposes. ~ George Washington

It is well for us when prayers about our sorrows are linked with pleas concerning our sins - when, being under God's hand, we are not wholly taken up with our pain, but remember our offences against God. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

In a place like this, there would be petty despots. Factions. This was a sunless world where madness and depravity reigned. ~ Ann Aguirre

The true understanding of our own depravity isn't a punishment - it's an opportunity to understand the value of the gift. ~ Angie Smith

475Oh, if you were the kind of man I am ... I loved the shame of depravity. I loved cruelty ... In a word
a Karamazov! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And I told him that I believed in God because I had seen His opposite. I had seen all that He was not, and been touched by it, and so I could no more deny the possibility of an ultimate goodness to set against such depravity than I could deny that daylight followed darkness, and night the day. ~ John Connolly

Mankind's tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Nobody ever became depraved all at once.
[Lat., Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.] ~ Juvenal

It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. ~ Simone Weil

Those who have no principles are never more dangerous than when they reach the age when they lose all sense of shame. Their hearts are gangrened by depravity, they refine and polish up their first offences and convert them into heinous crimes while still believing they are still at the stage of minor misdemeanours. ~ Marquis De Sade

We're capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness. ~ Jo Nesbo

On what grounds would God be told that He can bring death to millions of people at the end of a normal life span, but that He may not do it in any other way? ~ Donald Grey Barnhouse

Our view of human problems determines who is qualified to speak to them. If sin is the primary human problem, then those with the theological and practical expertise in dealing with sin – in its varied and complex forms – should lead the way in the field of people-helping. Unless we have an accurate and robust conception of sin, the church will concede much of its work to outside professional and will be ill-equipped to cooperate with them when needed. ~ James MacDonald

As one can hardly find any thing in a house where nothing keeps its place, but all is cast on a heap together; so it is in the heart where all things are in disorder, especially when darkness is added to this disorder: so that the hear t is like an obscure cave or dungeon, where there is but a little crevice of light, and a man must rather grope than see No wonder if men mistake in searching such a heat, sand so miscarry in judging of their estate (304). ~ Richard Baxter

Original sin, therefore, appears to be a hereditary, depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused through all the parts of the soul, rendering us obnoxious to the divine wrath and producing in us those works which the scripture calls 'works of. ~ John Calvin

"Secret migration" across borders is a form of human degradation and evidence of the depravity of the human conscience. ~ Hassan Blasim

A fair vision had welcomed him in this land of disease. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

To spare Cloyce's victims further indignities to their memory, I must be a scourge. To prevent others from perhaps being infected by Cloyce's depravity by watching him at work, I must be a scourge. To prevent time management technology from falling into the hands of authorities who, if not already corrupt, would be corrupted by it, I must be a scourge.
Scourges aren't heroes.
I had never imagined myself to be a hero, but never had I imagined I would be this.
Scourges transgress against social and sacred order.
A scourge went into darker territory than that. A scourge was not compelled to kill by mental imbalance or emotional confusion or selfish desire. A scourge made a carefully reasoned decision to kill in numbers that exceeded what was absolutely necessary to ensure self-preservation and the defense of the innocent. Even if he killed for the right reason, he was in rebellion against social order and commanding authority.
Who scourges will be scourged. In fulfilling this dark role in Roseland, I would bring about my own death.
Yet I knew I would not retreat from my decision. ~ Dean Koontz

When will we see that the depravity of the human heart is not most clearly on display in the gay pride parade or at the abortion clinic? The greatest failures in human experience are not seen in the activist atheist rallying unbelief or the scorning skeptic ridiculing Jesus Christ, or the senseless wars, or baffling famines. The greatest failure in human existence is the failure of Christ-followers to love one another earnestly from a pure heart ~ James MacDonald

He's classy,' said Klara, the first time she met him, and Simon beamed with pride. But this is also part of the problem: Simon likes raunch, likes being spanked and ogled and sucked off, and he has some appetite for depravity – or at least, what his parents would have called depravity – that he is finally beginning to acknowledge. ~ Chloe Benjamin

Have you ever noticed how few sitting places you find in private gardens? How seldom the versatility and importance of benches is considered? True gardeners, with their peerless taste, dexterity and inspired planting, never stop ... To sit is almost an offence, a sign of depravity and an outrage towards every felicitous refinement that has gone into making a garden. ~ Mirabel Osler

Close-viewed, their industry and function is that of dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously. As for their debauchery and depravity, it is perhaps unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus. ( ... ) Such are the shepherds of the people: and now how fares it with the flock? With the flock, as is inevitable, it fares ill, and ever worse. They are not tended, they are only regularly shorn. They are sent for, to do statute-labour, to pay statute-taxes; to fatten battle-fields (named 'Bed of honour') with their bodies, in quarrels which are not theirs; their hand and toil is in every possession of man; but for themselves they have little or no possession. Untaught, uncomforted, unfed; to pine dully in thick obscuration, in squalid destitution and obstruction: this is the lot of the millions. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Ubiquity is the master pacifier, a potent anaesthetic and persuasive desensitiser, and through the universality of His works - where both predator and prey, wicked and good suffer enormously without favouritism or bias in a universe whose laws know no sympathy - the wicked architect has ensured the curious and the distrusting will seek out any alternative explanation for that which they do not wish to recognise , or better still, not see the depravity at all. ~ John Zande

We know that laws ought to be obeyed only if they come out of people's sense of justice, not because the state needs them to preserve its power. Laws devised for the depravity of power are as worthless as the paper they are printed on. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

All our good is apparently from God, because we are first naked and holy without any good, and afterwards enriched with all good. ~ Jonathan Edwards

But in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable; they can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for example, that Christian distress of mind that comes from sighing over ones inner depravity and care for ones salvation - all concepts originating in nothing but errors of reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but obliteration. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity. ~ David McCullough

Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world. ~ Philip Zaleski

As a matter of fact, the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him. ~ Ayn Rand