Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Corruption, Colton implies, isn’t a moral lapse you dabble in; it’s physics. The brilliance of the snowball image is how quickly it yanks the conversation away from hand-wringing about personal virtue and toward momentum, scale, and inevitability. A snowball doesn’t stay cute. Once it’s rolling, it gathers whatever’s in its path - dirt, debris, bystanders - and the original act becomes almost irrelevant next to the expanding force it creates. That’s the subtext: the first compromise is the real catastrophe because it changes the rules of motion.

Colton is writing in a period when Britain is wrestling with reform, patronage, and the long hangover of old political arrangements. His aphoristic style fits a culture saturated in sermons and “improving” literature, yet he sidesteps piety. He’s not warning that corruption is sinful; he’s warning that it’s strategic self-entrapment. The official who takes a bribe has to cover it up. The cover-up requires allies. Allies require rewards. Rewards create new crimes. Soon you’re not protecting a mistake - you’re maintaining a system.

There’s also a quiet accusation aimed at institutions that tolerate “small” dishonesty. If corruption grows by accumulation, then everyone who looks away becomes part of the snowpack. Colton’s line lands because it refuses the comforting fantasy of contained wrongdoing. It’s an argument for early resistance, not because people are pure, but because systems are sticky and escalation is the default.