Venal Quotes

#1. Then, the stunningly white cubes that make up the Getty Museum. It's an architectural masterpiece funded by a venal billionaire's trust, housing third-rate art. Pure L.A.: might makes right and packaging is all. Traffic

Jonathan Kellerman

#2. If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants

Tony Judt

#3. A hotel is a hotel all the world over, a place essentially vulgar, commonplace, venal, the travesty of a human home.

Margaret Oliphant

#4. The impious man, who sells his country's freedom
Makes all the guilt of tyranny his own.
His are her slaughters, her oppressions his;
Just heav'n! reserve your choicest plagues for him,
And blast the venal wretch.

Henry Martyn

#5. Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.

Terry Eagleton

#6. The first requisite of a gentleman is to be true, brave and noble, and to be therefore a rebuke and scandal to venal and vulgar souls.

John Lancaster Spalding

#7. Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal.

Matt Taibbi

#8. Give them a corrupt House of Lords, give them a venal House of Commons, give they a tyrannical Prince, give them a truckling court, and let me have but an unfettered press. I will defy them to encroach a hair's breadth upon the liberties of England.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

#9. It is not possible to assert publicly that Monsanto is anything other than venal without being accused of being a sellout, a fraud, or worse.

Michael Specter

#10. You wonder if God doesn't have an answering machine to screen out the prayers of the venal and the boring? And in which category has he placed you?

Tom Robbins

#11. When all government ... in little as in great things ... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.

Thomas Jefferson

#12. Jesus Creeping God! Is there a priest in this tavern? I want to confess! I'm a fucking sinner! Venal, mortal, carnal, major, minor - however you want to call it, Lord ... I'm guilty.

Hunter S. Thompson

#13. What did he see, I wonder? What avenue opened before him? A sudden way through, an escape from all the torment? Or was it just the venal act of a selfish child, wanting to somehow punish the woman standing before him ... just passing the guilt along, as cowards will do. Well,

Steven Erikson

#14. I await the hour when a journalist can be driven from the press room for venal practices, as a minister can be unfrocked, or a lawyer disbarred.

Grantland Rice

#15. I've been called treacherous, stupid, venal, lazy ..and that's only by the Tories.

Peter MacKay

#16. Deep down I knew that if Hell existed, it was a real place full of ruthless, venal people, like the commodity pits at the Chicago Board of Trade, Disney World, or oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court.

Richard Dooling

#17. Actors can be many things - vain, venal, self-serving, obnoxious, bullies - but all of the good ones are great storytellers. I wanted to watch what my actors were doing and how they were telling the story.

Paul Bettany

#18. We on the left have forgotten that the question is not how do you get good people to rule, most people who rule are mediocre at best and usually venal. The question is how do we make those in power frightened of us and not be seduced by formal political processes.

Chris Hedges

#19. Words can be used for venal purposes. Words are incredible sources of propaganda and can cause terrible havoc.

Helen Mirren

#20. But they were as different as fire and ice. Robert Kennedy thought Eugene McCarthy was pompous, petty, and venal. McCarthy thought Kennedy was a spoiled, unintelligent demagogue.

Jack Newfield

#21. The venal herd.
[Lat., Venale pecus.]

Juvenal

#22. Our leaders, our government is us, all of us, so if they're venal and weak it's because we are.

David Foster Wallace

#23. Nixon represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.

Hunter S. Thompson

#24. All concierges are venal. It is not their fault. They are trained to regard all hotel guests except maharajahs as potential cheats and thieves. They have as much concern for your comfort or well-being as crocodiles.

Ian Fleming

#25. He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life's feast.

James Joyce

#26. I think there are people, and I do not mean this to be disparaging, there are people like Jay Mohr and Jeremy Piven where they just give you that vibe, 'This guy's going to play someone a little venal.'

Rob Thomas

#27. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace

James Madison

#28. But [the Arabs'] friendship was venal, their faith inconstant, their enmity capricious: it was an easier task to excite than to disarm these roving barbarians; and, in the familiar intercourse of war, they learned to see, and to despise, the splendid weakness both of Rome and of Persia.

Edward Gibbon

#29. After the shooting of John Lennon and the early death of so many great stars and the utter naked venal mercantile marketing of pop music and rock music, I don't think anyone really believes that music is anything more than another commodity.

Stephen Fry

#30. The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony.

Paul Goodman

#31. I could see the two sides hardening, their feelings intensifying, as both began to think the other not just wrong, but hideous, venal ... in league with the devil himself.

James Redfield

#32. I love to feature children and young adults as real people - flawed, naive, virtuous, venal - but real. I think it adds nuance and depth to the stories that wouldn't exist without them.

C.J. Box