John Milton Quotes

The vilest deeds like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison-air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there:

Does it seem that everything is extravagance in the world, or rather madness, when you watch the way things go? A crowd of rogues enjoy blessings they have won by sheer injustice, while more honest folks are miserable and die of hunger.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

Job's forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more unpredictable than either scientists or theologians generally make things look.

For there is no defense for a man who, in the excess of his wealth, has kicked the great altar of Justice out of sight.

It's a fallen world. We eat and sacrifice in the process.

I used to look down on the world for being corrupt, but now I adore it for the utter magnificence of that corruption.

None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.

Become corrupt, corrupt, and you will cease to suffer!" This has been the cry of all cities to man.

Let's face it: the world is twisted. And rotten.

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.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

When a leader encourages the culture of impunity, the society is lost and it makes the work harder for the rest of us.

The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.

Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed - naked and pure-minded. And no descendant of theirs has ever entered it otherwise. All have entered it naked, unashamed, and clean in mind. They entered it modest. They had to acquire immodesty in the soiled mind, there was no other way to get it. ... The convention mis-called "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone's whim - anyone's diseased caprice.

Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.

There is so much wrong with the world. (tanta stat praedita culpa)

Tired with all these for restful death I cry, As to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimmed in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn.

...in certain moods, no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.

Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.

Were the life of man prolonged, he would become such a proficient in villainy, that it would become necessary again to drown or to burn the world. Earth would become an hell; for future rewards when put off to a great distance, would cease to encourage, and future punishments to alarm.

They're all cruel,' he said. 'The world I come from, the world you come from, and this one, too. Maybe the people don't see the cruelty in your world right away, it's better hidden, but it's there all the same.

This world is twisted beyond hope, when lowborn smugglers must vouch for the honor of kings.

Man indeed is the most noble, by creation, of all the creatures in the visible World; but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble.

...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.