Motivational Quotes

Evil

Evil be to him who evil thinks.

- Edward II

Best Quotes about Evil

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal

Before man is life and death, good and evil; that which he shall choose shall be given him. [Ecclesiasticus]

Bible

Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.

Hemingway, Ernest

The pious pretence that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.

Crowley, Aleister

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.

West, Mae

I couldn't claim that I have never felt the urge to explore evil, but when you descend into hell you have to be very careful.

Raine, Kathleen

Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet.

Donne, John

Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Gandhi, Mahatma

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

Lerner, Max

10.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

11.

Nothing baffles the schemes of evil people so much as the calm composure of great souls.

Mirabeau, Gabriel Riqueti

12.

It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.

Darwin, Charles R.

13.

We must as second best...take the least of the evils.

Aristotle

14.

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.

Gloria Steinem

15.

Remember only the good, the bad will never forget you.

Horton, Doug

16.

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.

Eliot, T. S.

17.

One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.

Eliot, George

18.

Whenever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves, after the first suffering, how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers.

Leigh Hunt

19.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

Baudelaire, Charles

20.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

Of two evils we must always choose the least.

Thomas a Kempis

22.

It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.

Mary Renault

23.

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Arendt, Hannah

24.

But what is the greatest evil? If you are going to epitomize evil, what is it? Is it the bomb? The greatest evil that one has to fight constantly, every minute of the day until one dies, is the worse part of oneself.

Mcgoohan, Patrick

25.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

Plato

26.

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even -- if you will -- eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.

Brodsky, Joseph

27.

What is worse than evil? The inability to bear it.

Weber, C. J.

28.

No evil shall happen to the just.

Bible

29.

The face of evil is always the face of total need.

Burroughs, William S.

30.

Evil, and evil spirits, devils and devil possession, are the outgrowth of man's inadequate consciousness of God. We must avoid thinking of evil as a thing in itself-a force that works against man or, against God, if you will.

Butterworth, Eric

31.

Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

32.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

Plato

33.

I know indeed what evil I intend to do, but stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury, fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.

Euripides

34.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still and quiet in a room alone.

Pascal, Blaise

35.

Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.

Hesiod

36.

What wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.

Milton, John

37.

All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Auden, W. H.

39.

Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.

Oliver Goldsmith

40.

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

Ayn Rand

41.

We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place.

Maistre, Joseph De

42.

There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it.

Buddha

43.

Of two evils, it is always best to vote for the least hypocritical.

Proverb, American

44.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.

King Jr. Martin Luther

45.

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.

Theodore Roosevelt

46.

My mother's obsession with the good scissors always scared me a bit. It implied that somewhere in the house there lurked: the evil scissors.

Martin, Tony

47.

Overcome evil with good. [St. Paul]]

Bible

48.

Evil is nourished and grows by concealment.

Virgil

49.

To rid ourselves of our shadows -- who we are -- we must step into either total light or total darkness. Goodness and evil.

Johnson, Jeremy P.

50.

All histories do show, and wise politicians do hold it necessary that, for the well-governing of every Commonweal, it behoveth man to presuppose that all men are evil, and will declare themselves so to be when occasion is offered.

Raleigh, Sir Walter