Patrick O'Brian Quotes

Leisure is the handmaiden of the devil.

This is the very womb and bed of enormity.

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

The American who drinks wine is in danger of becoming the victim of drunkenness, licentiousness, and gambling.

Man has learned how to challenge both Nature and art to become the incitements to vice! His very cups he has delighted to engrave with libidinous subjects, and he takes pleasure in drinking from vessels of obscene form!

Pompeii was an incredibly corrupt city. Pompeii was the Las Vegas of the Roman Empire.

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

Now, neighbor confines, purge you of your scum! Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance, revel the night, rob, murder, and commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways?

Intemperance is a hydra with a hundred heads. She never stalks abroad unaccompanied with impurity, anger, and the most infamous profligacies.

There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterably dishonest that theft is to them a master passion.

Vice is a peripatetic, always in progression.

Any other town you go to there's this little devil and a little angel on your shoulder. A little good advice, a little bad advice.You go to Las Vegas, there's like a devil and a devil and they're just battling it out the whole time. It's like, "Smoke some crack!" "Get a hooker!" And then I go, "YEA! Yea, this is a good town. Smoke some crack and get a hooker! Alright!"

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!

Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery: nothing else holds fashion.

Morally, as a class, cowboys are foulmouthed, blasphemous, drunken, lecherous, utterly corrupt. Usually harmless on the plains when sober, they are dreaded in towns, for then liquor has an ascendancy over them.

Gambling was carried on extensively, and the saloons were full... mostly every one seemed bent on debauchery and dissipation... There appears to be plenty of money here, and plenty of fools to squander it... I verily believe that there are men here who would murder a fellow-creature for five dollars...

… the most depraved wretches on earth.

Shall piety be a license to immoral deeds, and shall religion be regarded as affording the occasion for all riotous extravagance?

…luxury is the result of wealth, or it makes wealth necessary. It corrupts both rich and poor, the one by possessing, the other by coveting. It sells out the fatherland to indolence and vanity; it deprives the State of all its Citizens by enslaving some of them to others and all of them to opinion.

Sedition is bred in the lap of luxury and its chosen emissaries are the beggared spendthrift and the impoverished libertine.

This is a filthy people wallowing in vice…. They do not avoid incest. They do not attend God’s church in true reverence. Moreover, men, … I shall not say marry, but rather debauch the wives of their brothers.

Although my mother and father were both completely legit, it was all around me, this crime and licentiousness.

Avoid sloth, the mother of all vices!

It's fun to be debaucherous and the worst version of yourself.

Think'st thou there is no tyranny but that Of blood and chains? The despotism of vice-- The weakness and the wickedness of luxury-- The negligence--the apathy--the evils Of sensual sloth--produces ten thousand tyrants, Whose delegated cruelty surpasses The worst acts of one energetic master, However harsh and hard in his own bearing.