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Definition of vicious:

  • (adjective) having the nature of vice
  • (adjective) bringing or deserving severe rebuke or censure;
  • (adjective) (of persons or their actions) able or disposed to inflict pain or suffering
  • (adjective) marked by deep ill will; deliberately harmful;

Sentence Examples:

It is probable that we should never outgrow the assumption until we have a generation of children taught to respect conduct for its merits, not for simple duration, holding a wise, strong, good person, however young, to be superior to an ignorant or vicious one, however old.

We therefore would mistake the matter if we thought that a state even of thorough and unqualified wickedness was exclusive of all enjoyment, for even the vicious affections must share in that enjoyment which inseparably attaches to every affection at the moment of its indulgence.

I have seen men of great ability and high standing in the official world do the most astonishing things in this respect when they might, as far as their voices could be heard, have easily arrested the vicious heresies by a bold utterance of their true opinions.

A woman of twenty-two, already a widow, mature beyond her years, exceptionally able, absorbed in the great game of politics, and accustomed to admiration, was not likely to care for a raw lad of nineteen, foolish, ignorant, ill-conditioned, vicious, and without a single manly quality.

From the saloon issue the wild-eyed and crack-brained enthusiasts, and the brutal and vicious emissaries of envy and hate, who want to substitute for a republic of reason, order, security, liberty, and law, the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary government of the mob.

I believe the English traveler who has taxed our nation with inquisitiveness for half a century is at last beginning to find out that we do not ask questions because we have the still more vicious custom of not opening our mouths at all when with strangers.

It was possible that something was afoot around him, quite probable, indeed, since he was in the most vicious part of the city, in the heart of gangland; but whatever it might be, it was certainly extraneous to his mission, or she would have mentioned it.

There are, however, many parishes where in this matter the strictest discipline is rigorously enforced Amusements, not necessarily or even often vicious, are objected to as being fraught with dangers which would never occur to any but the rigidly ascetic or the puritanical mind.

He was one of the special adherents of Marat, and a most vicious and venal creature, as his own memoirs, giving among other matters an account of his grotesque attempt to fly down out of his Austrian prison with a pair of paper wings, abundantly attest.

A formless shadow beside the trees materialized into a monstrous charging bulk; a thing like a gigantic gray bull, eight feet tall at the shoulders, with the tusked, snarling head of a boar and the starlight glinting along the curving, vicious length of its single horn.

And as he cursed on, the wrinkles would wiggle all over his face, and his ancient goatee would whip up and down; while vicious bits of forecastle obscenity would punctuate his contempt for the irreligion and the conceit of the younger generation of salts.

Then again, if her habits were as vicious as they are described, it is absolutely inconceivable that her husband should have remained in ignorance of the fact; it would imply that he must have been nothing more or less than an imbecile, which Marcus Aurelius decidedly was not.

Statistics of the first half of the present century seem to justify the conclusion that it is apparently the most potent factor, yet these statistics as a rule confound coincidence and cause, or effect and cause, or the vicious circles thereby resulting, to a remarkable degree.

Consul is very fond of play, and makes friends with some strangers on sight, but to others he takes an aversion without any apparent cause, and while he is not disposed to be vicious when not annoyed, he resents with anger the approaches of certain persons.

Here our author excellently treats that paradox of the Stoics, which affirms, that the wise or virtuous man is only free, and that all vicious men are naturally slaves; and, in the illustration of this dogma, he takes up the remaining part of this inimitable Satire.

It is a happy circumstance that while industry is attended with certain success, vice, drunkenness, and idleness are no better off than in Europe; the effect of this will be to give the virtuous that natural ascendancy over the vicious which they ought always to have.

On the third day after the accident, however, when they were about to bury him, he unexpectedly revived; and it was afterward observed, to the surprise of all who knew him, that, from being a vicious reprobate, he became one of the most virtuous of men.

There unquestionably is a criminal element in prison that is a menace to society, but depraved or vicious as some of these men may be, there is yet some good in every one of them and possibilities of truly chivalrous conduct in all of them when properly treated.

It would, to a still greater extent, place the wealth and intelligence of the nation under those without intelligence, who, for their own advantage, would lavish wealth on useless schemes, and vote away the property of the industrious to support the indolent and vicious.

A grave peril to the Republic would be a citizenship too ignorant to understand or too vicious to appreciate the great value and beneficence of our institutions and laws, and against all who come here to make war upon them our gates must be promptly and tightly closed.

Let us all be skeptics, let us all be vicious; but until their admirable efficacy is proved, let us jog on the beaten course of life, neither influenced by the scoff of infidelity, nor fascinated by the dazzling but flimsy garb of licentiousness and immorality.

I will suppose the beloved object to be ugly, stupid, vicious, perverse, selfish, low minded, or the reverse; man finds it charming by the same rule that makes his faults and foibles dearer to him than all the virtues and good qualities of his neighbors.

The wild-cat and the lynx in the branches overhead laid back their ears and showed their teeth in vicious snarls; and the rabbits huddled so close together that the two packs of them heaved convulsively as each strove to get behind or underneath his neighbors.

A little rabble of people followed, one of them leading the fiend that had done the mischief, a vicious, half-broken, buck-jumping brute that had worried us for a long time, although Harry always trusted his own fine horsemanship to get the better of her tantrums.

For herself, through all these frivolous years she had been content with the fact of her consummate horsemanship; she had hands, she had a seat, she had complete confidence (well-warranted) in her ability to manage the trickiest and most vicious of four-legged things.

The first few days were spent in the wildest debauchery and excesses; and it was not until the Mahdi and his followers had to some extent satiated their vicious passions, that they turned their attention to the dangers which threatened them from without.

The idea was to supply the Indian at cost, in exchange for his furs and other products, the implements of husbandry and the comforts of civilized life, at the same time to protect him from the demoralizing influences of the vicious among the white men.

Of course the Sergeants who had drawn up the lists of the horses to be used by the infantry officers took a secret pleasure in selecting the hardest trotters as well as the most vicious chargers in each squadron, so that my little mare was invariably chosen.

I felt that mingled sense of rank and responsibility which with the vain, the ignorant, or the vicious is the strongest temptation to excess, but with the honorable and intelligent constitutes the most pleasurable and the most elevated state of the human mind.

These feelings always existed among them, however, to a much greater degree than we are willing to concede, though their respect and love for women and children were greater before their simple natures were blunted and distorted by the vicious practices of the invading Europeans.

Attempts had been made to educate him in the native style, and this was the cause that had rendered him so intolerably vicious; nor is this to be wondered at, for few horses possess tempers sufficiently good to endure the severe treatment of the native riding schools.

Few good women have ever been so distressingly misplaced as Claudia was; therefore few could understand the hourly torture she suffered from the mere presence of her vicious companions, or the infinite sense of relief she felt in being rid of them, if only for one evening.

Our bankruptcy has aggravated, as our restoration will relieve the general effects; but the vicious currency on this side the water, whatever domestic sins it may have to answer for, cannot properly be made the scapegoat for the offenses of the other side of the water.

When the State guarantees the service of "clean women" to men of vicious habits, it actively encourages those vicious habits; and since these diseases are the direct outcome of such vice, the more the vice itself is encouraged the more the diseases resulting therefrom will increase in frequency.

In the first place, your Lordships will be astonished at the audacity with which he speaks of his own administration, as if he was reading a speculative lecture on the evils attendant upon some vicious system of foreign government in which he had no sort of concern whatsoever.

As far as his natural faculties are concerned he starts life free from the vicious habits of his parent, and should he in turn become a thief, as sometimes happens, it is not because he has inherited his father's thievish habits, but because he has himself acquired them.

He did not indeed appear to be vicious, any further than a most vehement desire to please himself and that in all manner of eccentric ways, totally irrelevant to the purpose of getting ahead on the road or serving the will of his rider, might be called vice.

It is this, and not any question of vicious habits, which draws from the apostle, who had fought his way through the whole jungle of doubts and difficulties and perplexities in which the weaker brethren were struggling painfully still, these ardent and decisive words.

The occasions above described are not utilized only by hardened profligates: young girls, some perhaps innocent, others, if not entirely innocent, at any rate not yet wholly depraved, and young men not yet altogether vicious attend the gatherings in search of amusement and change.

It is conceivable that some cases of strabismus in children are nothing more than vicious habits transformed into tics, since, as a matter of fact, attentive supervision is frequently sufficient to effect a cure, although no doubt in other cases some visual abnormality is responsible for the condition.

And so these unhappy communities were given over, as sham "States" of the Union, to the rule of the ignorant and vicious part of their population, to be sustained therein by the military power of the Nation, under the excuse that that part alone was loyal.

A graceful turret of wood, supported by a sculptured column, served as a dwelling place for this vicious animal, who being kept chained and rarely petted by his eccentric master, oftener at Paris than in his country home, had gained a very bad reputation.

Among others who accompanied him was one Terry, a vicious, unprincipled fellow, who, in a conflict with Patterson a year before, had begged abjectly for his life when he found himself slightly wounded, and ever after, spaniel-like, had licked the hand that smote him.

In truth, the most careful and competent students know now that the Empire slowly fell to pieces, partly because the political arrangements were vicious and inadequate, but mainly because the fiscal and economic system impoverished and depopulated one district of the vast empire after another.

Doubtless all of this enthusiasm for the nurture of children will at last arouse public opinion in regard to the transmission of that one type of disease which thousands of them annually inherit, and which is directly traceable to the vicious living of their parents or grandparents.

How many a one has come away from a dog show utterly disgusted with perhaps one of the best looking dogs on the bench, who, after admiring its attractiveness in every detail, discovers on too near an approach to him that he possesses a snappy, vicious disposition?

The singular resemblance to a circus, already profanely suggested, was carried out by a straggling fringe of boys and half-grown men on the outskirts of the encampment, acrimonious with disappointed curiosity, lazy without the careless ease of vagrancy, and vicious without the excitement of dissipation.

The man whose intellect is not discriminative and who fails to distinguish right from wrong, the real from the unreal, is carried away by his sense passions and desires, just as a driver is carried away by vicious horses over which he has lost control.

The young peer who succeeds in making somebody of himself does so in spite of a vicious system, and is entitled to infinite praise; but though our race is slow to learn, the people hear a wee bird singing these stirring days, and they begin to like the song.

These conscienceless usurers derive the largest profit from the abominable traffic, for the robbers are for the most part dissolute characters, who, contrary to the usual practice of the nomads, gamble away, or squander in vicious enjoyments, their money as soon as they get it.

Now, as a like uncertainty and variety of causes take place, even in natural objects, and produce a like error in our judgment, if that tendency to produce error were the very essence of vice and immorality, it should follow, that even inanimate objects might be vicious and immoral.

Now, our present voting system not only fails to encourage thrift, saving or accumulation of wealth, or to promote civilization, but has a contrary tendency, because it grants equality and power in government to the non-producer, to the shiftless, lazy and vicious consumers and wasters of property.

The children of the vicious for the most part grow up amid the surroundings which made their parents bad, and no child born of the most depraved mother will fail to respond to healthful influences early brought into play, unless an obviously abnormal condition exists.

That its present decadent forms, for those too devitalized to dance aright, can be demoralizing, we know in this day too well, although even questionable dances may sometimes work off vicious propensities in ways more harmless than those in which they would otherwise find vent.

A divorce ensued, the guilty parties married; but, within two years after, such was the brutal and vicious conduct of Captain Byron, that the ill-fated lady died literally of a broken heart, after having given birth to two daughters, one of whom still survives.

And a wife must be vicious indeed, and a reflection upon a man's own choice, who, for the sake of change, and where there are no qualities to seduce, nor affluence to corrupt, will run so many hazards to injure her husband in the tenderest of all points.

They were each denounced as Coercion Acts: the earlier enactment was in many ways the more lenient of the two; yet in principle the Act of 1881 was thoroughly vicious, whilst in principle the Act of 1882 was, as regards its most effective sections, thoroughly sound.

Product of the utmost of nobility in this modern virile, rugged American race, she would have died under even worse torture than these vicious Han scientists knew how to inflict, before she would have pleaded with me this way to betray my race and her honor.

What we most desire is that they themselves should choose their comrades among honest, studious, manly boys, and avoid the society of the mean, idle and vicious; yet at the same time they should treat all with the courtesy due from one human being to another.

With the characters, either as conceived or preserved, I have no fault to find; but was much inclined to congratulate a writer, who, in defiance of prejudice and fashion, made the Archbishop a good man, and scorned all thoughtless applause which a vicious churchman would have brought him.

I thought proper to say thus much of the few Scripture precepts, which require, not vicious actions, but actions which would have been vicious, but for such precepts; because they are sometimes weakly urged as immoral, and great weight is laid upon objections drawn from them.

Suetonius informs us, that Augustus, in the latter part of his life, contracted a vicious inclination for the enjoyment of young virgins, who were procured for him from all parts, not only with the connivance, but by the clandestine management of his consort Livia.

I thus am enabled to free myself from any ignoble, base, or vicious impressions, contracted from the contagion of ill company that I may be unavoidably engaged in, by the remedy of turning my thoughts in a happy and calm temper to view these noble examples.

The country school which he attended was some five miles from his father's house, and he was wont to ride there each morning and back in the afternoon upon a wiry, vicious little mustang that every one had prognosticated would some day be the death of him.

You are a gambler, a professional gambler, with all that that implies; your life is, of necessity, passed among the most vicious and degrading elements of mining camps, and you do not hesitate even to take human life when in your judgment it seems necessary to preserve your own.

From the moment an English boy leaves his father's house he is under the complete control of his principal, and consequently a ruinous veering about from school to school is effectually prevented, while the retention of a decidedly vicious boy would obviously be a most unprofitable policy.

In response, the slave driver lashed the gaudily bedecked sacrificial victims to their feet with vicious cuts of his pliant whip, and herded them like a drove of calves down a very long passage, lit at intervals by those strange column lamps of incandescent gas.

The vulgarity of a servant she would have retained under any circumstances, as she did even when promoted from being the maid to being the companion of Roxana; but it was unreasoning devotion to her mistress, combined with weakness of character, which led Amy to be vicious.

You will have marvelled that so large a percentage of bricks can appear to have been delivered broken; but this you would have been able to account for had you watched the builder at work, noting his vicious practice of halving a sound brick whenever he wants a bat.

When a trade or profession has not only every pecuniary incentive to create trouble, but when it is also largely promoted by notorious criminals and other vicious elements, the amount of mischief that is certain to result from the combination may well exceed the powers of imagination.

The Saxon became silent and thoughtful, with only a slight dash of more than ordinary care upon his features, the Italian grew peevish and irritable, the Spaniard was careless and neglectful, while the Frenchman became downright vicious in the wayward excesses of his spiteful humor.

Indeed, if he had not been careless in the matter of incurring demerits from small infractions of the rules, he might have attained respectable, if not high rank in the corps, for he was a clean living, clean spoken boy, without a vicious trait of any kind.

Whether it be the overcoming of a vicious habit, the strengthening of some defect or deficiency, the getting away from poverty and despair, whatever you desire, you can repeat your affirmation concerning it, silently, if with others, audibly when you are alone, until it becomes a part of you.

The fact that he is so easily and speedily cured, and that he resumes his vicious habits and suffers recurring attacks in consequence, proves only that the treatment lacks the quality of moral discipline which belongs to prolonged suffering and the penance of vigorous medication.

Selective influences that might have operated in a savage community have been kept in abeyance to a great measure by inherited property and class distinction; and though, fortunately, good men are continually rising, and vicious, idle men are falling, yet this is to a great extent kept in check.

Theories of sound in purely elastic air might give results approximately realized in practice, if the actual pulses with which we are concerned were given by a flail; but are pregnant of error when the atmosphere is mixed with vicious vapors, and the pulse is a breath of air.

He had some strange, magical power over the beasts; a savage dog would slaver and fawn on him, a vicious horse sheathed its violence at his touch, and, in especial at this season of lambing-time, he wrought wonders of midwifery on the ewes and of nursing on the lambs.

It is only because it has such unusual fitness to child-nature, such a store of philosophy and ingenuity in its appliances, and such a wealth of spiritual truth in its aims and methods, that it is so great a power with neglected children and ignorant and vicious parents.

Make it impossible for the criminal and diseased, the vicious and the decadent, to come to us; bar out those who seek our country merely because they cannot subsist in their own, and you will find that the remainder of our immigrants are valuable additions to our populations.

Of the many complaints that are brought against the output of our elementary schools, one of the most serious is that the boys and girls who have recently left school are voracious readers of a vicious and demoralizing literature which seems to be provided for their special benefit.

When, therefore, I find a young man professing a disregard for their society, or frequenting only the worst part of it, I always expect to find in him a soul which would not hesitate long, in the day of temptation, to stoop to vicious if not base actions.

Now, such contrasts obviously prove nothing more than that money-making is and would be a vicious aim if pursued regardless of these virtues, and it could well be replied that consideration of patriotism, philanthropy, love of family, etc., must in themselves impel one to earn and to save.

That of the poor man is no less degenerate, owing to bad food, unhealthy dwellings, neglected education, and by vicious example which at the opposite extreme, resembles in many points that of the rich man; the exploiter and the exploited meeting in the dens of vice.

If he could successfully attack, and safely subdue, a vicious and dangerous whale which was working destruction upon others who had assailed it; so he could harpoon a whale, under circumstances of difficulty or distance, when no less powerful and expert an arm could reach it.

This is a fair sample of the abuses practiced by many of those in authority, who in lieu of holding out a pattern for imitation, both by example and precept, are unfortunately too prone to indulge their own vicious propensities, setting all propriety, honor, and justice at defiance.

Besides, this kind of fanaticism of the Countess for her nephew, her constant attention to gratify every caprice, her readiness to excuse his faults, even when she should have blamed them severely, made his education vicious as possible, and brought out two faults with peculiar prominence.

It is an exceedingly handsome and stately tree, and ought to be better known in this country than it is at present; but much disappointment has been incurred through the vicious practice followed by nurserymen of grafting it high upon the rowan, a tree of much inferior bulk.

To which he made answer, like the impudent chap he is, that he were in a confidential situation, and if I knew of any young man who had been so unfortunate as to lead vicious courses, and wanted to turn steady, he'd have no objection to lend him his patronage.

The concurrent testimony of all who have to undertake it at a later stage: that the young are naturally neither vicious nor hardened, simply weak and undeveloped, except by the bad influences of the street, makes this duty all the more urgent as well as hopeful.

The finest gentlemen are less vicious here than they are temporarily foolish; and one has not been long acquainted with Lady Easy before the discovery is made that she is the first pure and sensible woman that has been represented in a comedy since a world of time.

Just how it actually was made we do not know, but there is no reason to suppose that it was not in the commonplace way of experimenting with and testing lenses that he had produced, perhaps those made to meet a vicious case of myopia in one of his patrons.

Outside the wind howled, sweeping with a vicious whirl over the long naked ledges, loosening here and there a thin flake of stone, which spun round and round for a moment like a forest leaf, then fell with a light pattering noise upon the ridge below.

Nor need we fear to admire too much, that, in the most vicious mind, which is worthy of our admiration; as if we should detest vice the less, for seeing the ruin it makes, or for detecting its insidiousness in undermining the fair qualities which may call forth our praise.

It is by no means the rule, however, for children always to follow in the footsteps of weak or vicious parents; and it is the experience of social workers that such children, taught by observation to avoid the faults seen in their own homes, often make good parents themselves.

The moment men cease to augment the common stock, the moment they no longer enrich it by their industry or their self-denial, their luxury and even their ease are obliged to pay contribution to the public; not because they are vicious principles, but because they are unproductive.

The average life of the pauper (that is the vicious pauper) will be shorter still seeing that in his idle, vicious life the parent refuses to acknowledge his responsibilities towards his children and makes no effort to save them from perishing through want and proper healthful conditions.

This was an artful though harmless arrangement to enable those going off duty to have a meal and at least an hour's rest in peace, as on the voyage back both wind and sea would be astern and the vicious lurching of the small ship reduced to a minimum.

Besides all this, he was known and esteemed for a steady young man, who, though he might incur a little suspicion among the strictly religious folk by his neglect of public worship, was guilty of no waste of time or money in vicious company and riotous living.

Judging from the columns of the newspapers, there must be many thousands who come to this most deplorable end; and if I can only turn one from such a vicious course, I shall feel I have benefitted mankind even more than by killing rats and other vermin.

And now vicious people would say he had been guilty, of the intolerable meanness of giving up Dora Ashton either in order that he might satisfy his ambition by a more distinguished marriage, or that he might be the freer to direct his public career towards some lofty goal.