quotations about evil
The idea that an unbridgeable chasm separates good people from bad people is a source of comfort for at least two reasons. First, it creates a binary logic, in which Evil is essentialized. Most of us perceive Evil as an entity, a quality that is inherent in some people and not in others. Bad seeds ultimately produce bad fruits as their destinies unfold. We define evil by pointint to the really bad tyrants in our era, such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and other political leaders who have orchestrated mass murders.... Upholding a Good-Evil dichotomy also takes "good people" off the responsibility hook. They are freed from even considering their possible role in creating, sustaining, perpetuating, or conceding to the conditions that contribute to delinquency, crime, vandalism, teasing, bullying, rape, torture, terror, and violence. "It's the way of the world, and there's not much that can be done to change it, certainly not by me."
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
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
Evils are the breathings of the unjust.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Being against evil doesn't make you good.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Islands in the Stream
Human beings mostly aren't [evil]. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.
NEIL GAIMAN & TERRY PRATCHETT
Good Omens
An evil thought in a soul is like a water-rat swimming in a pond at evening: the rat destroys the iridescent reflection of heaven in the water.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
letter to Bourguet, 1712
No evil can happen to a good man, neither in life nor after death.
PLATO
The Apology
It takes longer to cure evil than to seek it.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Evil is retributive: every trespass slips fetters on the will, holds the soul in durance till contrition and repentance restore it to liberty.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: a man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.
ROD SERLING
Los Angeles Times, 1967
If you speak not, you cannot speak evil.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The evil you do to others you may expect in return.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.
JOHN GREEN
Looking for Alaska
In every man's heart there is a devil, but we do not know the man as bad until the devil is roused.
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
"The Case of Beauvais", Back to God's Country and Other Stories
All evils are equal when they are extreme.
PIERRE CORNEILLE
Horace
People aren't evil and people aren't good. They live how they can one day at a time. They come out of dust they go back to dust, dusty feet, no wings, and whose fault is that?
CARYL CHURCHILL
A Dream Play
For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
The ultimate test ... to see the good in evil and the evil in good.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon