John Dryden Quotes

Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice!

We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing.

The world is increasing in wickedness.

It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss in all things good; but in all things bad getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of.

... a moral skunk .... [who has] debauched America ...

Never will there be grief enough over the corruption of morals so extensively increasing and promoted by irreligious and obscene writings, theatrical spectacles and meretricious houses established almost everywhere; by other depraved arts and monstrous portents of every error disseminated in all directions; by the abominable impurities of all vices and crimes growing constantly and the deadly virus of unbelief and indifferentism spread far and wide; by contempt for ecclesiastical authority

The priests, either from indulgence or carelessness, have allowed the wicked to give loose reins to their lusts

A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.

Other vices make their own way; this makes way for all vices. He that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.

Vice is a peripatetic, always in progression.

For what is there more hideous than avarice, more brutal than lust, more contemptible than cowardice, more base than stupidity and folly?

Who isn't fascinated by evil?

Wilde is the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years.

This is the essential evil of vice, that it debases man.

We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place.

Bad company corrupts good character.

There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness.

The temptations to wrong are many; they spring out of a corrupt nature.

All things can corrupt when minds are prone to evil.

Evil changes everybody!

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

We live in a world that is filled with filth and sleaze, a world that reeks of evil. You cannot afford that filthy poison to touch you. Stay away from it. Avoid it.

Evil is only good perverted.