United States or Pitcairn Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If there was, indeed, much more wickedness in the world than there is, it would not prove such general assertions against human nature, since much of this arrives by mere accident, and many a man who commits evil is not totally bad and corrupt in his heart.
I will not attempt, especially after this lapse of years, to describe the feelings with which I listened to this amazing evidence. The black wickedness and the cold-blooded treachery of the man overwhelmed and paralysed me, so that when, after some further testimony, the chairman asked me if I had any questions to put to the witness, I could only stammer: "It is a lie, an infamous lie!"
Its streets were filled with a swaggering disbanded soldiery that had faced the might of England and the Company in four pitched battles during the last decade, shameless women peered from its every lattice, and its defence of religion took the form of frequent bloodthirsty "cow rows," but he saw in its wickedness no insuperable bar to the success of his policy.
The waves dash with violence upon the rocky shores; the wind often blows in fearful hurricanes; while earthquakes and hot streams from the burning mountains, fill the people with terror. But more terrible than any of these is wickedness; and very wicked customs are observed in Japan.
They were the culmination of centuries of misgovernment; and they paid an awful penalty for the sins of generations of short-sighted and selfish ancestors, as well as for their own cruelty and wickedness. Let this monument, O man! stand forever.
If this man, again, indulges in an envious or a sensual emotion, with such an energy and entireness, as for the time being to preclude all action of the higher powers of reason and self-reflection, so that for the time being he is not in the least troubled by a sense of his wickedness, it will be no excuse for him at the eternal bar, that he was not thinking of his envy or his lust at the time when he felt it.
The woman making this statement, wrote the Colonel, "is not only unfit to be at the head of a female college, but is not fit to teach the lowest class in a kindergarten; for such teaching is not merely folly, but a peculiarly repulsive type of mean and selfish wickedness."
You dream of beautiful things, and the world is full of ugly ones; you dream of love and constancy, and purity, and the world is full of spite, and hate, and bribery, and wickedness; you have a world of your own, but Angela, it is a glass world! in which only the exquisite colours of your own soul are reflected, take care that the pretty globe does not break! for if it does you will never be able to put it together again!
In a note to the Life of Dickens, Forster mentions that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, who held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil portrait of a young lady from his clever brush; and it is said that 'he had contrived to put the expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice, kind- hearted girl. M. Zola, in one of his novels, tells us of a young man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which bear a curious resemblance to his victim.
It was absurd to imagine that a man really heartbroken by remorse and shame for one act of perfidy would determine to lighten his conscience by committing a second act of perfidy as odious and as disgraceful as the first. The promised atonement was so wicked and base that it never could be made by any man sincerely desirous to atone for past wickedness and baseness.
Word Of The Day