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.
Wickedness comes to its height by degrees. He that dares say of a less sin, Is it not a little one? will ere long say of a greater, Tush, God regards it not!
My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.
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.
It is an esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands and legs.
I had no companions to quarrel with, nobody to assist, and nobody to thank. . . the evil consequence of all this was not, however, what might perhaps have been expected, that I grew up selfish or non affectionate; but that, when affection did come, it came with a violence utterly rampant and unmanageable.
The ne plus ultra of wickedness is embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity.
It takes physical courage to indulge in wickedness. The "good" are too cowardly to do it.
So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the [slave] trade's wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for abolition. Let the consequences be what they would: I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition.
Virtue and vice are not arbitrary things; but there is a natural and eternal reason for goodness and virtue, and against vice and wickedness.
Wickedness is weakness.
We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed.
It is supposable that, in the eyes of angels, a struggle down a dark lane and a battle of Leipsic differ in nothing but excess of wickedness.
A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.
Although among heretics and schismatics there is the same Baptism, nevertheless, the remission of sins is not operative among them because of the very rottenness of discord and wickedness of dissension. . . Baptism was in them, but it did not profit them outside the Church. . . Outside the Church, Baptism works death because of discord.
Do not become angry and furious. . . . for those two emotions lead to wickedness, and wickedness leads to the Hellfire.
[Judaism is] ever. . . mighty in wickedness. . . when it cursed Moses; when it hated God; when it vowed its sons to demons; when it killed the prophets, and finally when it betrayed to the Praetor and crucified our God Himself and Lord. . . And so glorying through all its existence in iniquity.
Almost all the moral good which is left among us is the apparent effect of physical evil.
[About Eichmann:] It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
. . . is it surprising that today we have become so morally blind (for wickedness blinds) that we save the baby whales at great cost, and murder millions of unborn children?
