quotations about evil
When a man hath established a Throne of Judgment in his own soul and is able to put a difference between Good and Evil, Right and Wrong: then he must reform himself according to such knowledge and always hold himself to that which his Judgment tells him is Good and Right.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil.
WALT DISNEY
Deeds Rather Than Words
Evil wishes, like chickens, come home to roost.
AESOP
"The Bee and Jupiter", Aesop's Fables
One thing I've learned from centuries of combat is that no matter how thoroughly you think you exterminate the evil, it comes creeping back like a cockroach.
DR. FATE
"The Hand of Fate", Superman
You would not easily guess
All the modes of distress
Which torture the tenants of earth;
And the various evils,
Which like so many devils,
Attend the poor souls from their birth.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Verses on a Cat"
In some situations there is no absolute good or evil, simply points of view.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Ham on Rye
For every great evil, apparently irremediable, there is reserved, it is probable, somewhere in the design of Providence, an effectual remedy.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
When there exists anywhere a state of suffering, a wrong, a condition of affairs that men of feeling deplore and that troubles the conscience of the upright, to become resigned to it is wicked. Although the evil flaunts itself before our eyes, and no remedy is in sight, we must go and seek a remedy. In the creation of the God of Justice, evil can be but a transitory state.
CHARLES WAGNER
Justice
As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can't eat, and home the very place you can't live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.
C.S. LEWIS
Perelandra
Most people confuse evil with their own trivial lusts and perversions. Now, true evil is as pure as innocence.
DAMIEN THORNE
The Final Conflict
Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The Revolt of the Angels
What we call evil, it seems to me, is simply ignorance bumping its head in the dark.
HENRY FORD
Theosophist Magazine, Feb. 1930
Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Destroy the man of wicked thoughts,
Like a bamboo-tree with its fruit.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka
Many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
No man is permanently and fixedly evil, until he is willingly evil.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
For hence I believed Evil also to be some such kind of substance, and to have its own foul and hideous bulk; whether gross, which they called earth, or thin and subtile (like the body of the air), which they imagine to be some malignant mind, creeping through that earth. And because a piety, such as it was, constrained me to believe that the good God never created any evil nature, I conceived two masses, contrary to one another, both unbounded, but the evil narrower, the good more expansive.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever -- money, for instance, or war.
SAUL BELLOW
The Dean's December
Of what use are good words to an evil heart?
LOUIS BECKE
"Solepa", By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore and Other Stories