Rotten To The Core Quotes

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Human feeling. That's beyond my range. I'm rotten to the core

If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?

Standing there in-between two disgusting Dumpsters in some crappy alley with the whole world crumbling down around me, and hearing Alex say those words, all the fear I have carried with me since I learned to sit, stand, breathe— since I was told that at the very heart of me was something wrong, something rotten and diseased, something to be suppressed—since I was told that I was always just a heartbeat away from being damaged—all of it vanishes at once. That thing—the heart of hearts of me, the core of my core—stretches and unfurls even further, soaring like a flag: making me feel stronger than I ever have before.

But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn't be hocked.

Evil? (Sin) To the core of her rotten soul. (Kat) It’s true. There’s nothing like a bitch in heels, of which I’m the biggest. I know there has to be a point to this, since you’re in a dream with gorgeous twins and nobody’s naked. I could have sworn I taught you better, Katra. (Kytara)

When I say that life is like an onion, I mean this: if you don't do anything with it, it goes rotten. So far, that's no different from other vegetables. But when an onion goes bad, it can either do it from the inside, or the outside. So sometimes you see one that looks good, but the core is rotten. Other times, you can see a bad spot on it, but if you cut that out, the rest is fine. Tastes sharp, but that's what you paid for, isn't it?

This is the rotten core, the Grünewald, the nails in the hands, the needle in the arm, the trauma, the bomb, the thing after which we cannot ever write poems, the slammed door, the in-principio-erat-verbum. Very What-the-fuck. Very blood-sport. Very university historical. But don’t stop looking.

I was just peeling some potatoes for dinner and they all looked like crisp white potatoes until I cut them in half. Every single one had a rotten, gray core. [. . .] I feel like the whole world is black, rotting, and evil. Even when it looks crisp on the outside, that's a lie, because you can't trust anything - on the inside it's nothing like mold. [. . .] So, see, nothing good is ever going to happen, and anyone who says it is, is lying to you.

They want me to have a beautiful surface and be rotten to the core, like they are.

Your loveliness is not a mask, layered over a rotten core. It blossoms from the beauty inside.

They say this fruit be like unto the world / So sweet. Or like, say I, the heart of man / So red without and yet within, unclue’d / We find the worm, the rot, the flaw. / However glows his bloom the bite / Proves many a man be rotten at the core.

although he was at core a rotten being, no one could fault him for style.

any era that is dominated by the love of money only, has a rotten core within it and must perish

Only good people think they’re bad. People who are truly rotten to the core think the problem is everyone else.

An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife.

To Lovecraft, a tainted past is the rotten core from which present-day horror germinates.

Human feeling. That's beyond my range. I'm rotten to the core.

But I thought I fixed this problem, I muttered to myself all day long. I thought I became a nice girl. I picked and picked at my memories, trying to figure out how, despite my best efforts, the horrible, rotten core at the center of myself managed to get past my defenses and worm its way out.

For what was civilization but the intellect’s ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits.

We're all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known. But the American approach -- ugh. Rotten at its core. It was too artificial and grabby, Vigil believed, too much about getting stuff and getting it now: medals, Nike deals, a cute butt. It wasn't art; it was business, a hard-nosed quid pro quo. No wonder so many people hated running; if you thought it was only a means to an end--an investment in becoming faster, skinnier, richer--then why stick with it if you weren't getting enough quo for your quid?

I may be blemished but I am not rotten to the core.

Trans liberation is not a threat to any lesbian woman or gay man or bisexual person. Yes, trans liberation is shaking up old patterns of thoughts or beliefs. Good! Because most of those thoughts and beliefs that we are challenging were imposed on us from above, were rotten to the core and were backed up by bigoted laws. But we're not taking away your identity. No one's sex reassignment or fluidity of gender threatens your right to self-identify and self-expression. On the contrary, our struggle bolsters your right to your identity. My right to be me is tied with a thousand threads to your right to be you.

Removing the thought about the rotten feather, for now, Yuan calms his core, inhaling prana—the source energy from air. The animal’s wound healing. All the rabbits turn their necks now, watching him. At last, he deserves attention. They run to the Monk; jumping; climbing along the layered folds of his dark shawl; settling on his lap, thighs, and shoulders; competing with one another for the healing energy; seeking a share of the purity coming from the highest possible evolution in the universe. A monk’s purity procured through strict abstention won’t stain. Even a dead bird’s foul feather can’t tinge it.

Take a look at the society we live in. It is rotten to the core, infected with attachments. What is an attachment? An attachment is an emotional state of clinging caused by the belief that without some particular thing or some person you cannot be happy.

There’s no practical difference in the mind of the slighted between a real slight and a perceived slight.

If your faith is so shaky that it can be undermined by books that challenge it, then something is rotten at the core.

Anna imagines that, were she able to visit the caves in which people first dwelled, she would find scrawled drawings that have been omitted from museums and history books. There would be scenes of ritual aggression and submission, painted in blood, caked with dried seminal fluid. They are the very antithesis of fresh, the rites between men and women; age-old and rotten to the core.

found it very difficult to determine my worth independent of him. Since puberty I had accepted, as a fact of my existence, that I wasn’t worth anything; that the ugly thing was ever-present inside me. That it was the dark truth, a rotten core, and that the smiling daytime Bri was the facade. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that so many of the feelings I struggled with are perfectly normal for abuse and trauma survivors.

I’ve fought for and against pretty much every cause there is. There will always be war of some kind. At first it was over fertile soil and good water, then precious metal and then the most popular version of human disagreement, ‘My God is better than your God.’ Whether you draw your faith from Jeremiah and Jesus, Allah and Muhammad or Brahma and Buddha, it doesn’t matter. Someone will tell you you’re wrong, and he’ll fight you over it. Me, I believe in aliens, and to hell with all earthly gods. In the grand scheme of a trillion planets in the universe we’re just not that damn important anyway. And humans are rotten to the core.

You made me fall in love,” Kim said. “You made me want to be a better man, even if I had to claw my way to that conclusion through thickets and thorns. You made me wake wanting you there and sleep in the knowledge that you were, and believe that I had you by my side, with that glorious, stubborn, unshakeable Will Darling obstinacy. And I am terrified, I am sick with fear, that I will lose you to the walking ancestral curse that is my family—not just the painted trappings and gilded vainglory, but the hollowed-out decaying heart of it. That’s my magnificent inheritance: a family rotten to the core, a blighted tree that will fall in the next storm.

Let's use our exclusion and invisibility as a power to create impermeable spaces for ourselves, unburdened by the ridiculous and biased premises of the dominant class. Let's use our erasure from this rotten-to-the-core Western notion of humanity to build up a different “new world,” one that is not defined in terms of dichotomies or hierarchies or emotional death—but centered on love: one in which we accept ambiguity and difference, grounded in an expansive, limitless “we.” We are at the center of a radical shift taking place in pro-animal discourse precisely because, upon self-reflection, we can see that our struggle is their struggle. I don't mean this symbolically. I mean this literally.

While the Texas prison officials remained in the dark about what was going on, they were fortunate that William and Danny had benign motives. Imagine what havoc the two might have caused; it would have been child's play for these guys to develop a scheme for obtaining money or property from unsuspecting victims. The Internet had become their university and playground. Learning how to run scams against individuals or break in to corporate sites would have been a cinch; teenagers and preteens learn these methods every day from the hacker sites and elsewhere on the Web. And as prisoners, Danny and William had all the time in the world. Maybe there's a lesson here: Two convicted murderers, but that didn't mean they were scum, rotten to the core. They were cheaters who hacked their way onto the Internet illegally, but that didn't mean they were willing to victimize innocent people or naively insecure companies.

Instead of one bad king we’ve got Parliament, which is a heap of bad kings. Men that care no more for the people than I care for that fly. Men that will grind you, and tax you, and make merchandise of you, and neglect your interest and tread you down to the ground. Many is the cheat they’ve passed upon you. At this moment you cheer me when I say down with the kings, but you look at one another and you raise your eyebrows when I say down with the parliament. You’ve got the suffrage and you think that’s all right. The suffrage! what does the suffrage do for you? It’s another sham, a little stronger than all the rest. They’ll give more of you, and more of you the suffrage, till they let in the women (I don’t say a word against that. Some of the women have more sense than you have, and the rest you can always whop them) and the babies next for anything I can tell. And it will all be rotten, rotten, rotten to the core. And then a great cry will rise out of this poor country, and it will be Hamlet again,” cried the orator,

Mankind - proud conqueror and king swings its flag of primal glory to the winds Titans of the power-myth that failed Neanderthal hunger for the flesh of war so frail So weak, so hollow-minded the primat flock responds the jester race submits For each day of war is a failure for man, enslaved in her mordial genes Illusions bleed from their fetid cores, bent to their rotten extremes We, the plague of Terra Firma, nature's grand and last mistake plant the poisoned seed of cancer, set the severed fruits awake Burning like frozen relics in god's archaic graveland Burn the visionaire Kill the ideaologies Mankind must die The doves and the angels return to their graves with flames on their pestilent wings while mushroom-clouds haunt their virginwhite skies to rape their utopian dreams Living the last days of evolution's end from the nest of humanity, the graveland vultures rend

You surprise me, she says. Do I? he says. Why? Though I like to surprise you. He lights a cigarette, offers her one; she shakes her head for no. He’s smoking too much. It’s nerves, despite his steady hands. Because you said they fell in love, she says. You’ve sneered at that notion often enough—not realistic, bourgeois superstition, rotten at the core. Sickly sentiment, a high-flown Victorian excuse for honest carnality. Going soft on yourself? Don’t blame me, blame history, he says, smiling. Such things happen. Falling in love has been recorded, or at least those words have. Anyway, I said he was lying. You can’t wiggle out of it that way. The lying was only at first. Then you changed it. Point granted. But there could be a more callous way of looking at it. Looking at what? This falling in love business. Since when is it a business? she says angrily. He smiles. That notion bother you? Too commercial? Your own conscience would flinch, is that what you’re saying? But there’s always a tradeoff, isn’t there? No, she says. There isn’t. Not always. You might say he grabbed what he could get. Why wouldn’t he? He had no scruples, his life was dog eat dog and it always had been. Or you could say they were both young so they didn’t know any better. The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds. And I haven’t said he didn’t kill her afterwards. As I’ve pointed out, he was nothing if not self-interested. So you’ve got cold feet, she says. You’re backing down, you’re chicken. You won’t go all the way. You’re to love as a cock-teaser is to fucking. He laughs, a startled laugh. Is it the coarseness of the words, is he taken aback, has she finally managed that? Restrain your language, young lady. Why should I? You don’t. I’m a bad example. Let’s just say they could indulge themselves—their emotions, if you want to call it that. They could roll around in their emotions—live for the moment, spout poetry out of both ends, burn the candle, drain the cup, howl at the moon. Time was running out on them. They had nothing to lose. He did. Or he certainly thought he did! All right then.She had nothing to lose. He blows out a cloud of smoke. Not like me, she says, I guess you mean. Not like you, darling, he says. Like me. I’m the one with nothing to lose. She says, But you’ve got me. I’m not nothing.

The fruit of a healthy emotional life comes from recognizing and believing that the old corrupt emotional life has been done away with. If a process is involved, it is only a process of recognizing something that has already taken place. We are not “peeling the onion” so to speak, through an endless removal of layer after layer of sin. Let’s face the facts. The very core of that old man was rotten to the very center. The whole onion needed to be thrown away. Instead, you have to see the process of maturation and Christian growth as one of opening your Christmas presents! You’re not peeling back layers of garbage from 1982. You are plunging into the never-ending joy of discovery. Discovering the glorious gift that has been deposited within you.

This is why conservatives lose. They lose because while they proclaim that Obama’s signature legislation fails on the merits, raising costs and lowering access to vital services, the left surges forth with a different message: Conservatives are rotten to the core.

Why are you friends with those girls anyway?" His face glows orange in the flame of his lighter. "Same reason I am, I suppose." He laughs sardonically. "They're fit, aren't they? Nice to look at? Popular?" He inhales deeply then blows smoke at the sky. "Superficial bullshit. None of us is immune. It's pervasive, the sickness at the heart of our society." He stoops over the bin, and for a second I think he might vomit, but then he reappears with something held delicately between his thumb and forefinger. It's a brown half-eaten apple that he spins like a globe. "There is something rotten at the core of our world. Something broken at the heart of everything, on every level. Think about it. The planet - broken. Society- broken." Henry points at the apple, roughly where the United Kingdom might be. "And us---" he glances at me "---the individuals, two little specks of nothing in all this madness..." "Broken?" Mr Goldfish guesses, filling the long, strange silence. "Totally and utterly screwed." - ppg 237+238

To Tarzan of the Apes the expedition was in the nature of a holiday outing. His civilization was at best but an outward veneer which he gladly peeled off with his uncomfortable European clothes whenever any reasonable pretext presented itself. It was a woman's love which kept Tarzan even to the semblance of civilization—a condition for which familiarity had bred contempt. He hated the shams and the hypocrisies of it and with the clear vision of an unspoiled mind he had penetrated to the rotten core of the heart of the thing—the cowardly greed for peace and ease and the safe-guarding of property rights. That the fine things of life—art, music and literature—had thriven upon such enervating ideals he strenuously denied, insisting, rather, that they had endured in spite of civilization. "Show me the fat, opulent coward," he was wont to say, "who ever originated a beautiful ideal. In the clash of arms, in the battle for survival, amid hunger and death and danger, in the face of God as manifested in the display of Nature's most terrific forces, is born all that is finest and best in the human heart and mind." And so Tarzan always came back to Nature in the

War was an awful thing. It left an impression on her cells, soured the blood flowing through her veins, leaving a rotten stench inside her that only she could smell. She didn’t want to admit it was guilt, but it was, festering forever in her core.

this is the trouble with myth. each of us scoops out our own rotten core and spits it out onstage. we stand around the heap of smoking corpses and declare it fate.

Rejection eats at a person like a worm winding its way through an apple: sooner or later it reaches the core, and you become completely rotten. I

In the grand scheme of a trillion planets in the universe we’re just not that damn important anyway. And humans are rotten to the core.

I won't sweeten the truth. Not ever." He shrugged then pushed his fingers into my hair as he gazed at me, drinking me in. "And the filthy, rotten core of it is…you're the best thing that's ever happened to me. And I won't let you go. I'm your captor, baby, but you’re mine too. And I say we both throw away the key and stay in each other's cages forever.

Words locked in my throat, but I had to say them before I took the kiss I was craving. Words that I had thought would never leave my mouth, let alone feel them in every drop of my blood, right down to my rotten core. "I'll always be a monster, baby. I'll be the reason Fae lock their doors at night in Alestria, I am branded on the inside of my enemies' skulls and my name will always strike fear into their hearts. But I will also be your monster, if you'll have me. If you deem me worthy. I don't have much to give but a blackened heart and a tarnished soul, but they're yours because...” I took a breath and expelled my deepest truth, “I love you.

This we share. Scars and knowledge and broken safety that was never really in the first place, because we were born to bad apples. The difference is, he grew far from the fruit that tree bore, while I'm rotten at the core, even if I'm good at hiding it.

I can speak for myself, you know, Simeon. You’re always doing that.’ ‘Sorry, old sport. Just trying to be helpful.’ ‘It’s patronizing and you’re to stop it at once.

At first, I was sure that if I looked hard enough I’d see that she was his match: rotten at the core.

A man who claims to bear the name of Christ, yet secretly bows down to idols and runs to false gods, is like a branch that appears to be part of the tree but is actually rotten to the core. His lips may profess faith, but his heart is far from one Living God, and his actions betray the truth - that he is a spiritual adulterer, trying to serve two masters, but ultimately serving none.

They whispered to me – Jo … Jo … Jo … Jo … – as if I was leaking into the room and dissolving, flowing from my own bloody crotch like black juice from a rotten apple core.

But for me,dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was the civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity into the ether of the finely superfluous? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits

Creditors have better memories than debtors. God heals, and the Doctor takes the Fees. The greatest monarch on the proudest throne, is oblig’d to sit upon his own arse. The nearest way to come at glory, is to do that for conscience which we do for glory. The noblest question in the world is, What Good may I do in it?   If you wou’d not be forgotten As soon as you are dead and rotten, Either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.   Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power. The ancients tell us what is best; but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest.

I remember my father telling me about England’s redrawing of India’s boundaries when it became independent. They wanted to separate the Hindu from the Muslim, but they used outdated maps. Twelve million people had to relocate because the Brits screwed it up so badly. And a half million people died during the resulting chaos. And before that, Iraq was unilaterally cobbled together, causing many of the conflicts we see today. There are dozens of such examples. The strong countries smashing the weaker ones and then avoiding responsibility later for the very problems they caused.” “You keep proving my point, Tom, that we’re rotten to the core.” “My point is we never learn!

If your faith is so shaky that it can be undermined by books that challenge it, then something is rotten at the core. And

It’s like that club, just a delusional waste of time. Sure, it looks pretty, but it only hides a heart that’s rotten to the core,

An apple with a rotten core can only last so long,” he

The Vietnam war was wrong, rotten to the core. But the military, the government, the police, big business were all congealing in my view into a single, opressive mass -- The System, The Man. These were standard issue youth politics at the time, of course, and I was soon folding school authorities into the enemy force. And my casual, even contemptuous attitude toward the law was mostly a holdover from childhood, when a large part of glory was defiance and what you could get away with.

-“I remember my father telling me about England’s redrawing of India’s boundaries when it became independent. They wanted to separate the Hindu from the Muslim, but they used outdated maps. Twelve million people had to relocate because the Brits screwed it up so badly. And a half million people died during the resulting chaos. And before that, Iraq was unilaterally cobbled together, causing many of the conflicts we see today. There are dozens of such examples. The strong countries smashing the weaker ones and then avoiding responsibility later for the very problems they caused.” -“You keep proving my point, Tom, that we’re rotten to the core.” -“My point is we never learn!

I love the burning rage in those green eyes. I want more of Anya. To bring that crazy to the forefront to see and bathe in all of her ugliness. Because something so beautiful must surely be rotten at the core.

And the filthy, rotten core of it is…you're the best thing that's ever happened to me. And I won't let you go. I'm your captor, baby, but you’re mine too. And I say we both throw away the key and stay in each other's cages forever.

think I might actually lose it then. I know Grace is only trying to help, but I can’t shake off the feeling that there is something really messed up about Draycott, something that goes even deeper, beyond Mr. Werner selling grades to students. Something tells me that Draycott is rotten, all the way to the core, and nothing I do can ever fix it.

I have to seep into their rotten core and unveil their dirty secrets. Infiltrate. Expose. Escape.

America’s Gilded Age was always rotten at the core. Glittering estates and palaces of commerce for the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies, the squalid tenement and factory floor for the masses. Two entire generations of workers had been sacrificed to that grinder to make the Rockefellers rich. But when the gleaming veneer cracked, the whole system fell apart, and the country lapsed into a stupor like it had never known. The Panic of 1893 was the worst depression the United States had yet endured.

Rotten. Like all forbidden fruit, he appears lush. But his insides are brown and sodden with the foul stench of bacteria. They are covered with rot and deterioration. On the outside, he shines and shimmers in the sunlight. But inside, the shriveled fruit festers as pus oozes through its thick skin. Ryu Suzuki is indeed rotten to the core.

Rotten. Like all forbidden fruit, he appears lush and supple. A golden apple covered in a thin vermillion wax layer and a tantalizing taste of plush caramelized flavour. Hues of red and brown are woven into the skin, a perfect marriage of color that gets infected until it warps, sodden with the foul stench of bacteria. On the outside, he shines and shimmers in the sunlight. However, his insides are shriveled fruit that festers as pus oozes through its thick skin. Ryu Suzuki is indeed rotten to the core.

So many toxic relationships exist and are allowed to thrive because none of us are much good at being lonely. Having something awful is better than having nothing at all. I'm not criticizing the logic. I get it. A rotten apple core while you're starving is better than nothing. But don't eat shit food for the rest of your life.

The rotten fruit… The rotten fruit be of the same rotten spirit of the soul that has thrown themselves to the burning pit to be destroyed. As the rotten tree gives of the rotten sour fruits what can you possibly do with bad luck of bad food. The fortune of the futures for told in the roots of the trees that communicate with the earth. To give the language of Mother Earth power to speak to every living thing a purpose tomorrow. The rotten fruit be of the destruction of the planet that causes the confusion of the concern to whatever the wars are about. When you have a bad apple, you don’t leave it in the bunch. The rot spreads quickly. If you don’t separate them from the rest. As it starts the decomposition process of returning to the soil. See the rotten fruit have the purpose of the leaves, the trees as well as the roots. However, the rot be spread of the disease to the sickly of saplings it becomes of the poison ivy. I be lying if I said I didn’t think it was deserved. It just wasn’t of my doing. The rotten fruit is not of my core of character it be of yours though. Clearly, I can prove it. I will throw a pebble into the population of many people you have hurt. As the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree now does it. A lot to be said about rotten fruit don’t you think. Now you may speculate on what it all means.

But the dynamics of Mexican cartels have also developed in distinct ways from Colombia. Mexico has seven major cartels—Sinaloa, Juárez, Tijuana, La Familia, Beltrán Leyva, the Gulf, and the Zetas—so it is hard to decapitate them all at once. When leaders such as Osiel Cárdenas are taken out, their organizations have only become more violent, as rival lieutenants fight to become top dog. Groups such as the Zetas and Familia have also become powerful because of their brand names rather than the reputation of their capos. Even if Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano, the Executioner, is arrested, the Zetas will likely continue as a fearsome militia. Whether the cartels will get weaker or not, everybody agrees that Mexico needs to clean up its police to move forward. Different corrupt cops firing at each other and working for rival capos is nobody’s vision of progress. Such police reform is of course easier said than done. Mexican presidents have talked about it for years, going through numerous cleanups and reorganization of forces, only to create new rotten units. A central problem is the sheer number of different agencies. Mexico has several federal law enforcement departments, thirty-one state authorities, and 2,438 municipal police forces. However, in October 2010, Calderón sent a bill to be approved by Congress that could make a real difference to the police. His controversial proposal was to absorb all Mexico’s numerous police forces into one unified authority like the Colombians have. It is a colossal reform with a huge amount of technical problems. But such a reform could be a key factor in pulling Mexico away from the brink. Even if drugs are eventually legalized, a single police force would be a better mechanism to fight other elements of organized crime, such as kidnapping. The approach has many critics. Some argue it would only streamline corruption. But even that would be a better thing for peace. At least corrupt cops could be on the same side instead of actively gunning each other down. Others argue an all-powerful force would be authoritarian. Maybe. But any such force would still be controlled by democratic government. The spiderweb of different police forces only worked because one party ran everything. In democracy, this arrangement needs reform. If a crucial cause of the breakdown in Mexico has been the fragmentation of government power, then a way forward could be to unify its police under one command. Some of the fundamental problems and core solutions lie in Mexico’s institutions.

Soviet Jews would be released because the Soviet empire was in tatters. That was certainly my view, one that I had developed over the previous decade through telling conversations. In 1979, at the first Jonathan Institute conference in Jerusalem, I had spoken with the great Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. “Benjamin,” he had said, “please understand, the Soviet regime is desperate. Everything is rotten inside. Nothing works. It’s one big rotten core held together by the façade of invincibility provided by nuclear ICBMs parading in Red Square.” He predicted that within a decade the Soviet Union as we knew it would collapse. He was right on the

The Empire is rotten to its core, no matter what this new Emperor tries to do. But if you think bringing the Alanga back will right some sort of wrong, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Rejection eats at a person like a worm winding its way through an apple: sooner or later it reaches the core, and you become completely rotten.

I know I saw nothing wrong with insurance fraud, just as I saw nothing wrong with drug smuggling, or with anything else I considered a victimless crime. Draft dodging, still well in the future for me but already upending the lives of the older brothers of friends, I vehemently endorsed. The Vietnam War was wrong, rotten to the core. But the military, the government, the police, big business were all congealing in my view into a single oppressive mass—the System, the Man. These were standard-issue youth politics at the time, of course, and I was soon folding school authorities into the enemy force. And my casual, even contemptuous attitude toward the law was mostly a holdover from childhood, when a large part of glory was defiance and what you could get away with. But a more conscious, analytic, loosely Marxist disaffection was also taking root in my politics in my midteens. (And disaggregating, intellectually and emotionally, the mass of institutional power—sorting out how things actually worked, beyond how they felt as a whole—would turn out to be the work of many years.) In the meantime, surfing became an excellent refuge from the conflict—a consuming, physically exhausting, joy-drenched reason to live. It also, in its vaguely outlaw uselessness, its disengagement from productive labor, neatly expressed one’s disaffection. Where was my sense of social responsibility? Not much in evidence. I marched in peace marches. I was still a good student, which really proved nothing except that I liked to read and was hedging my bets.

Eunice just wanted a different favor. She wanted to hear Merrin say the forbidden words, to make okay the rotten thing at Eunice’s core that makes her ashamed and afraid of herself.

Yeh should’ve ignored him, Arthur,’ said Hagrid, almost lifting Mr Weasley off his feet as he straightened his robes. ‘Rotten ter the core, the whole family, everyone knows that. No Malfoy’s worth listenin’ ter. Bad blood, that’s what it is.

rotten to the core.

he hates his own weakness, he hates human weakness and misery. His deepest instinct is towards strength and health, ‘pure will’ without the troubles and perplexities of intellect’. He does not believe that he is rotten to the core; he does not believe ‘there is no health in us’. There is strength— he is certain of that—but a long way down, and it would take a great deal of will to blast one’s way down to it. Very well, show him a way, any way. Show him an enemy worth his strength.

Spending more time in nature and cultivating our mystic-sensibilities are two effective joy-promoting strategies. But these strategies can prove futile if our morbidness becomes so excessive that we adopt what William James called “the dust-and-ashes state of mind”. This mindset is defined by the dreadful suspicion that evil and futility lurk behind all experiences, and that the greatest goods of life are rotten with a worm at the core. James was no stranger to this mindset and as a young man he confessed in a letter to his brother: “I cannot bring myself, as so many seem able to do, to blink the evil out of sight, and gloss it over.

And if your difference of opinion with a friend reflects a difference in core values, you might want to handle it with a little less honesty and an extra dose of polite. Saying you don’t believe in the health benefits of organic nut spread is a little different than saying you don’t believe in a woman’s right to choose, or a free Palestine, or that the New England Patriots are dirty rotten cheaters.

But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect’s ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn’t be hocked.

As she screams her words, she slaps me like the worldchampion surf lifesaver she is, with full hip rotation and follow-through. Magnificent core strength. Textbook technique. Open hand to cheekbone, cheek, and jaw. Nope, she couldn’t have hit me better. Ten out of ten, say the judges. The crowd cheers. Deuce, no make that game to Chelsea. The nose—that’s where I feel it. It’s just like at the beach when a dumping wave strikes with the power of Aquaman, causing salt water to dance, prance, and gurgle in and out of the nostrils. I feel the pressure of that slap like that wave is holding me down for seconds and seconds. I see this weird combination of circling stars. Under pressure such as this, my core values are wobbling. I could whack her right across the chops. I’m livid. That’s how I feel. In my eyes, she’s a piece of shit right at this point. A fake. A liar. A fucking pretender. I always knew she was hiding something. She was always too damn good to be true. That’s why she does so much for the community: because she’s rotten to the core. No. I fucking love her way more than I can cope with. Jerome Kremers, book 2, TEAM PURSUIT.

From the outside everything looks fine,” the dentist said, “but it’s rotten to the core.

It is a remarkably painful thing to have someone you care about and admire judge your existence, your very identity, the world you inhabit, and deem it rotten to the core. My brother hates everything about being a Perez, and the more he professes his desire to distance himself from our family, the more it seems impossible for him to love those of us who were born into this lifestyle. I am my parents’ daughter. How can you love something you denounce with such fervor?

Most defectors’ knowledge of history consisted of little more than shining legends from the lives of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader. This was when they were told that it was an unprovoked attack from the North, not from the South, that began the Korean War on 25 June 1950. Many rejected this loudly, and outright. They could not accept that our country’s main article of faith – believed by most North Koreans – was a deliberate lie. Even those who knew that North Korea was rotten to the core found the truth about the war very hard to accept. It meant that everything else they had learned was a lie. It meant that the tears they’d cried every 25 June, their decade of military service, all the ‘high-speed battles’ for production they had fought, had no meaning. They had been made part of the lie. It was the undoing of their lives.

Just because the Fall ripped [goodness and beauty] apart and beauty can be misused doesn’t mean they can’t go together. It’s not true that goodness comes only in plain and ugly packages, or that beauty has to hide a rotten core.

Paul's explanation for why the gospel, the unveiling of God's justice and salvation, is urgently required is that the tree is rotten to the core, and might come crashing down at any minute.

Humans are a lot like apples. Some are sweet, some are sour, and some are rotten. Different colors on the outside, but all the same on the inside. You peel away all the layers of an apple, and the core is always the same. You know what I see at the core of most human beings? I see everything I despise. I see evil. I see a population brimming with rotten vermin.

Cheated of shivering and cramps. Cheated of pleas and tears. Nothing outside of me, just my brain winding up my spinal cord like a rubber band in a toy airplane. Struggling to squirm out of the rotten frozen core of that dark, that dark, that dark so cold, you could cut it with a knife, with a knife so sharp, it would cut off your thumb, and your thumb so numb, it wouldn't cut butter, and the butter so small that it sings in the eye of an icicle and slips through a needle, through a needle so thin, it would slide off your spoon, and the spoon so hot, it burns a hole in your tongue, and your tongue so wet that it sticks to a frosty parking meter, and there you are, there you are, there you are, stuck. On a city street in the dirty sleet, stuck by your tongue.

Personal god, of isms, just is not. It is a fairytale of stone age. Only by learning of and abiding by the metaphysical truth and reality of ONENESS OF ALL, can we be humane beings. Otherwise we remain who we are - rotten at the core, rascals, uncured till death, wild beasts.