Quotes on Wickedness

Evil can be condoned only if in the beyond it is compensated by good and god himself needs immortality to vindicate his ways to man.

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so; life's business being just the terrible choice.

No human being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.

Evil is uncertain in the same degree as good, and for the reason that we ought not to hope too securely, we ought not to fear with to much dejection.

Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.

Malice often takes the garb of truth.

To great evils we submit, we resent little provocations.

In law, what plea so tainted and corrupts, but being seasoned with a gracious voice obscures the show of evil.

The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.

In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.

God bears with the wicked, but not forever.

When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.

I am a wicked man... But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing, precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked man but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it.

I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind could devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature.

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.