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S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Wickedness

God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness; and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked. The human faculties and reason are in such cases deranged; and therefore this man has been dragged by the just vengeance of Providence to make his own madness the discoverer of his own wicked, perfidious, and cursed machinations in that devoted country.

Edmund Burke: Impeachment of Warren Hastings.

We can never be grieved for their miseries who are thoroughly wicked, and have thereby justly called their calamities on themselves.

Some are so hardened in wickedness as to have no sense of the most friendly offices.

Roger L’Estrange.

Wickedness may prosper for a while, but at the long run he that sets all knaves at work will pay them.

Roger L’Estrange.

That mind must needs be irrecoverably depraved which,… tasting but once of one just deed, spatters at it, and abhors the relish ever after.

Nothing can support minds drooping and sneaking, and inwardly reproaching them, from a sense of their own guilt, but to see others as bad.

Robert South.

No one kind of true peace is consistent with any sort of prevailing wickedness.

Edward Stillingfleet.

Wickedness is a kind of voluntary frenzy, and a chosen distraction; and every sinner does wilder and more extravagant things than any man can do that is crazed and out of his wits only with this sad difference, that he knows better what he does.

John Tillotson.

A man that cuts himself, and tears his own flesh, and dashes his head against the stones, doth not act so unreasonably as the wicked man.

John Tillotson.

Was ever any wicked man free from the stings of a guilty conscience, from the secret dread of divine displeasure, and of the vengeance of another world?

John Tillotson.

’Tis scarce possible for any man to be so strangely infatuated, so wholly lost to common reason, as to believe that vicious courses, despising of religion, walking contrary to God, can be the means to entitle him to this future happiness.

Bishop John Wilkins.