Licentiousness Quotes

“We thought of [New York] as a free city, like one of those storied prewar tropical nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions.”

— Luc Sante

“Of all the wicked heresies and threatening movements facing the church in our day, when Westminster Seminary finally organized their faculty to write something in unison, they gave their determined political efforts not to fight socialism, not to fight homosexuality, not abortion, not crime and mayhem in our society, not subjectivism in theology, not dispensationalism, not cultural relativism, not licentiousness, not defection from the New Testament, not defection from the Westminster Confession of Faith, all of which are out there and they can give their legitimate efforts to ... boy the thing they had to write about was theonomy! How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he doesn't see the problem?”

— Greg L. Bahnsen

“I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it's because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and drink their blood.”

— Clarice Lispector

“Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.”

— George Washington

“Thomas Hobbes's politics are fitted only to promote tyranny, and his ethics to encourage licentiousness.”

— David Hume

“[T]he artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted ...”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Herman Bavinck explains: On balance, however, the disadvantages do not outweigh the advantages. For the denial of the clarity of Scripture carries with it the subjection of the layperson to the priest, or a person's conscience to the church. The freedom of religion and the human conscience, of the church and theology, stands and falls with the perspicuity of Scripture. It alone is able to maintain the freedom of the Christian; it is the origin and guarantee of religious liberty as well as of our political freedoms. Even a freedom that cannot be obtained and enjoyed aside from the dangers of licentiousness and caprice is still always so to be preferred over a tyranny that suppresses liberty.4”

— Kevin DeYoung

“The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be liberty.”

— Fisher Ames

“The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

“Heavens! let me not suppose that she dares go about Emma Woodhouse-ing me! But, upon my honour, there seems no limits to the licentiousness of that woman's tongue!”

— Jane Austen

“Without Liberty, Law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without Law, Liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.”

— James Q. Wilson

“There are men who strike at liberty under the term licentiousness.”

— Jonathan Mayhew

“This was why men fell in love with strippers and escorts: it wasn't the licentiousness, the dissembling, their craven willingness to do whatever you wanted. It was the way they would, out of the blue, surprise you with the psychic ability to know what you needed.”

— Chris Bohjalian

“Let us concede at the outset that, in a free society, freedom will frequently be used badly. Freedom, by definition, includes freedom to do good or evil, to act nobly or basely. Thus we should not be surprised that there is a considerable amount of vice, licentiousness, and vulgarity in a free society. Given the warped timber of humanity, freedom is simply an expression of human flaws and weaknesses. But if freedom brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best.”

— Dinesh D'Souza

“Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices.”

— Denis Diderot

“The early Christians saw the connections quite clearly, which is why they set themselves apart from the licentiousness. They did not frequent houses of prostitution, they did not divorce, they did not kill their babies, and they did not engage in sexual perversion.”

— Anthony Esolen

“Wild Bill had his faults, grievous ones, perhaps ... He would get drunk, gamble, and indulge in the general licentiousness characteristic of the border in the early days, yet even when full of the vile libel of the name of whiskey which was dealt over the bars at exorbitant prices, he was gentle as a child, unless aroused to anger by intended insults ... He was loyal in his friendship, generous to a fault, and invariably espoused the cause of the weaker against the stronger one in a quarrel.”

— Jack Crawford

“Small crimes always precede great crimes. Whoever has been able to transgress the limits set by law may afterwards violate the most sacred rights; crime, like virtue, has its degrees, and never have we seen timid innocence pass suddenly to extreme licentiousness.”

— Jean Racine

“A large portion of our citizens, who will not believe, even on the evidence of facts, that any public evils exist, or are impending. They deride the apprehensions of those who foresee, that licentiousness will prove, as it ever has proved, fatal to liberty.”

— Fisher Ames

“[P]erfect freedom consists in obeying the dictates of right reason, and submitting to natural law. When a man goes beyond or contrary to the law of nature and reason, he ... introduces confusion and disorder into society ... [thus] where licentiousness begins, liberty ends.”

— Samuel West

“Will posterity believe that, while the Press has swarmed with inflammatory productions that tend to prove the blessing of theoretical confusion and speculative licentiousness, not one writer of talent has been employed to refute and confound the fashionable doctrines, nor the least care taken to disseminate works of another complexion.”

— Arthur Young

“Bringing up daughters for nothing but marriage, mingles poison in the cup of domestic life, is traitorous to the virtue of both sexes, for neither suffers alone
is adverse to the happiness, to the development of conscience and to religion, and introduces to the dwellings of wretchedness and despair. The result of this degradation is pride, intemperance, licentiousness
nay, every vice, misery, and degradation.”

— Harriot Kezia Hunt

“Immoderate assurance is perfect licentiousness.”

— William Shenstone

“Therefore let us repent and pass from ignorance to knowledge, from foolishness to wisdom, from licentiousness to self-control, from injustice to righteousness, from godlessness to God.”

— Clement Of Alexandria

“The gospel of licentiousness, of selfishness, of blaming all the difficulties of life on external factors - these are the things that are killing people today in ways that the slave whips and the overseers couldn't.”

— Alan Keyes

“That this liberty [of the press] is often carried to excess; that it has sometimes degenerated into licentiousness, is seen and lamented, but the remedy has not yet been discovered. Perhaps it is an evil inseparable from the good with which it is allied; perhaps it is a shoot which cannot be stripped from the stalk without wounding vitally the plant from which it is torn. However desirable those measures might be which might correct without enslaving the press, they have never yet been devised in America.”

— James Madison

“The liberty of the press is dear to England; the licentiousness of the press is odious to England: the liberty of it can never be so well protected as by beating down the licentiousness.”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“If Julian had flattered himself that his personal connexion with the capital of the East would be productive of mutual satisfaction to the prince and people, he made a very false estimate of his own character, and of the manners of Antioch. The warmth of the climate disposed the natives to the most intemperate enjoyment of tranquillity and opulence; and the lively licentiousness of the Greeks was blended with the hereditary softness of the Syrians.”

— Edward Gibbon

“History will also give occasion to expatiate on the advantage of civil orders and constitutions; how men and their properties are protected by joining in societies and establishing government; their industry encouraged and rewarded, arts invented, and life made more comfortable; the advantages of liberty, mischiefs of licentiousness, benefits arising from good laws and a due execution of justice. Thus may the first principles of sound politics be fixed in the minds of youth.”

— Benjamin Franklin

“The Roman Christian mythology (and theology) discourages the vice of licentiousness, and so this is better than the heathen, but it encourages bigotry, hypocrisy, cant, and many another vice which the older Mother of Abominations kept clear from.”

— Theodore Parker

“During the course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levelled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“[Emigrants] will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“As in our lives so also in our studies, it is most becoming and most wise, so to temper gravity with cheerfulness, that the former may not imbue our minds with melancholy, nor the latter degenerate into licentiousness.”

— Pliny The Elder

“Liberty, when it degrades into licentiousness, begets confusion, and frequently ends in tyranny or some woeful confusion.”

— George Washington

“Beware of self-righteousness. The black devil of licentiousness destroys his hundreds, but the white devil of self-righteousness destroys his thousands.”

— Charles Spurgeon

“A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Montesquieu well knew, and justly admired, the happy constitution of this country [Great Britain], where fixed and known laws equally restrain monarchy from tyranny and liberty from licentiousness.”

— Lord Chesterfield