84 Quotes About Immorality

We're not afraid of sanctions. We're not afraid of military invasion. What frightens us is the invasion of western immorality.

Although aesthetically nugatory, "Beat Culture and the New America" was an exhibition of considerable significance -- but not in quite the way that Lisa Phillips, its curator, intended, Casting a retrospective glance at the sordid world of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, Ferlinghetti, and other Beat icons, the exhibition unwittingly furnished a kind of pathologist's report on one of the most toxic cultural movements in American history.

Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not quite old enough to do that.

Just like the owner of the Golden Goose to be as immoral as her patrons and just like a princess to make demands with the fate of humanity on the line.

The Beats, like their successors in the Sixties, have often been described as 'idealists'. But fantasies of total gratification are not the product of idealism. They arise from a narcissism that, finding the world unequal to its desires, retreats into a realm of heedless self-absorption. Modesty, convention, and self-restraint then appear as the enemies rather than as the allies of humanity. In this sense, the Beat generation marks a step away from civilization.

Folk tell their children that success lies in working hard and being thrifty, but that is as much nonsense as supposing that a badger, a fox and a wolf could build a church. The way to wealth is to become a Christian bishop or a monastery's abbot and thus be imbued with heaven's permission to lie, cheat and steal your way to luxury.

In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; the outrageous was met with enthusiastic applause.

There is not much to say about Burrough's writing. It consists of semiliterate ravings by a very sick mind, a kaleidoscope or surrealistic depictions of drug-taking, violent, often misogynistic fantasy, and sexual depravity.

But the point is this Monsieur...the reason why Madame complains of you is not because of the immorality in itself; but because, so she tells me, you make immorality delicious.