… the vices and wickedness of the Secular Era, some of which still lingered, he said, in the cities of the East – irreligiosity, scepticism, occultism, depravity. And I thought of the ideas I had so casually imbibed from Julian and (indirectly) from Sam, some of which I had even begun to believe: Einsteinism, Darwinism, space travel …

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.

Is it a very wicked place?" I asked, more for the sake of saying something than for information.

"You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered in London. But there are plenty of people anywhere, who'll do that for you."

"If there is bad blood between you and them," said I, to soften it off a little.

"O! I don't know about bad blood," returned Mr. Wemmick; "there's not much bad blood about. They'll do it, if there's anything to be got by it."

"That makes it worse."

"You think so?" returned Mr. Wemmick. "Much about the same, I should say.

The vices and moral weakness of man are not invincible: Man is perfectible, or in other words, susceptible of perpetual improvement.

as long as a
great number of those impressions which form character, like the nice
motions of the arm, remain absolutely independent of the will of man,
though it would be the height of folly and presumption to attempt to
calculate the relative proportions of virtue and vice at the future periods
of the world, it may be safely asserted that the vices and moral
weakness of mankind, taken in the mass, are invincible.