Wickedness Quotes

“Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.”
― Mae West, The Wit and Wisdom of Mae West

“All things truly wicked start from innocence.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, — all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, — who is good? not that men are ignorant, — what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.”
― W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

“A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“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.”
― Jane Austen

“She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“It is very difficult to make one's way in this world without being wicked at one time or another, when the world's way is so wicked to being with.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril

“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

“My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most dishonourable belief against the character of the divinity, the most destructive to morality, and the peace and happiness of man, that ever was propagated since man began to exist. It is better, far better, that we admitted, if it were possible, a thousand devils to roam at large, and to preach publicly the doctrine of devils, if there were any such, than that we permitted one such impostor and monster as Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and the Bible prophets, to come with the pretended word of God in his mouth, and have credit among us.

Whence arose all the horrid assassinations of whole nations of men, women, and infants, with which the Bible is filled; and the bloody persecutions, and tortures unto death and religious wars, that since that time have laid Europe in blood and ashes; whence arose they, but from this impious thing called revealed religion, and this monstrous belief that God has spoken to man? The lies of the Bible have been the cause of the one, and the lies of the Testament of the other.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

“Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“The weakest ones are the wickedest cruel
When the strongest ones in gentleness rule!”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, The Witches Of Avignon

“Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.”
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

“Among wise men there is no place at all left for hatred. For no one except the greatest of fools would hate good men. And there is no reason at all for hating the bad. For just as weakness is a disease of the body, so wickedness is a disease of the mind. And if this is so, since we think of people who are sick in body as deserving sympathy rather than hatred, much more so do they deserve pity rather than blame who suffer an evil more severe than any physical illness.”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“If the Divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God.”
― C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

“No matter how an individual views Satan, whether they believe that he is a real character or that he is just the product of literary scholars and imaginations, no one can deny that each one of us has an aspect of the devil within us. By studying the character and nature of Satan, we learn about ourselves; and the more we know about ourselves, the better we can fight our own personal demons—metaphorical or otherwise—in order to create a better tomorrow”
― Nwaocha Ogechukwu

“To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“In fact, now you mention the subject, I have been very bad in my own small way.
I don't think you should be so proud of that, though I am sure it must have been very pleasant.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Isn’t that the way God works? She’d thought. He takes the things in our lives that are ugly, disgusting, and downright wicked, and transforms them into something magnificent.”
― J.E.B. Spredemann, An Unforgivable Secret

“If you think that you're so smart and holy, that means you haven't yet realized that a part of what we experience today...is a result of our stupidity and wickedness in the past.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You oh God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“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.”
― John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

“They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor the wicked, nor for guys like Billy, who were uncommitted regarding the whole idea of virtue versus wickedness and who were just trying to do their jobs.”
― Dean Koontz, Dark Rivers of the Heart

“Are those paper clips?' I'd seen them in catalogs, but the pictures don't do them justice. They're beautiful, in an industrial sort of way.
Eldric poured a clinking waterfall into my palm. 'Aren't they lovely! I can't keep my hands off them. But I give you fair warning: It was a box of paper clips that got me expelled.'
'Expelled?'
'A box of thousand paper clips,' he said, his long fingers curling, coiling, twisting. 'And a sack of colored glass.'
'Expelled!' I might be a wicked girl who'd think nothing of eating a baby for breakfast, but I'd never allow myself to get expelled. It's far too public.”
― Franny Billingsley, Chime

“I loathe, detest, hate and abominate the block, the gibbet, the rack, the pillory and the faggots with equal passion," said the old man vehemently. "Not only are they devilishly cruel but they are not even common sense. They do not lesson the evil in the world, they increase it, by making those who handle these cruelties as wicked as those who suffer them. No, I'm wrong, more wicked, for there is always some expiation made in the endurance of suffering and none at all in the infliction of it.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The White Witch

“You have not realized yet that both of you are mine, have you?”
― D.S. Wrights, The Beast and Me