Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left.There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive. But in all Syme's circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it. There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong.

Profit should never come at the cost of human blood. Any government that places profit before people is pure evil.

Don't show your inferiority by climbing a stunted tree, show your superiority by climbing the longest and crooked one.

Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.

The burden of a porter is temporary, but the burden of a crooked politician is permanent because his conscience always carry the enormous burden of his frauds!

The punter sweated on top of Marina, his lips all over her young body, his tongue slipping out from rows of crooked teeth, pushing hungrily from between his shrivelled lips like a clam from a shell, a bottom feeder searching for salty nutrition.

I marvel at the placidity of the Utopian who imagines that man is perfectible. There is no denying that the human creature is born selfish, abusive, vile. Just look around you and see. Society cynical and ferocious, the humble heckled and pillaged by the rich traffickers in necessities. Everywhere the triumph of the mediocre and unscrupulous, everywhere the apotheosis of crooked politics and finance. And you think you can make any progress against a stream like that? No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less rotten at present. Only the form of his sins varies. Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.

Your ultimate reason for staying in this crooked world is not to imitate its devastating physique, but trying do something about its ugly appearance.

The Word of God I think of as a straight edge, which shows up our own crookedness. We can't really tell how crooked our thinking is until we line it up with the straight edge of Scripture.

Most priests wish they were as righteous as they seem to most members of their congregations.