[spodefly]

History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster." -- General Douglas MacArthur

Men are qualified for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free." -- Edmund Burke

[little jeremiah]

Here's another good one: (I know it's kind of long for those with short attention spans, but they probably wouldn't get it anyway).

BTW, you should add the rest of the Burke statement:
"Their passions forge their fetters."


"True freedom, the freedom that liberates, is grounded in truth
and ordered to truth and, therefore, to virtue. A free person
is enslaved neither to the sheer will of another nor to his own
appetites and passions. A free person lives uprightly, fulfilling
his obligations to family, community, nation and God. By contrast,
a person given over to his appetites and passions, a person who
scoffs at truth and chooses to live, whether openly or secretly,
in defiance of the moral law is not free. He is simply a different
kind of slave. The counterfeit of freedom consists in the idea of
personal and communal liberation from morality, responsibility and
truth. It is what our nation's founders expressly distinguished
from liberty and condemned as 'license.' The so-called freedom
celebrated today by so many of our opinion-shaping elites in
education, entertainment and the media is simply the license
to do whatever one pleases. This false conception of freedom --
false because disordered, disordered because detached from moral
truth and civic responsibility -- shackles those in its grip no
less powerfully than did the chattel slavery of old. Enslavement
to one's own appetites and passions is no less brutal a form of
bondage for being a slavery of the soul. It is no less tragic,
indeed, it is in certain respects immeasurably more tragic,
for being self-imposed. It is ironic, is it not, that people
who celebrate slavery to appetite and passion call this bondage
'freedom'?" --Imprimis