Motivational Quotes

Evil

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.

- Gloria Steinem

Best Quotes about Evil

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.

Lawrence, D. H.

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

Weber, C. J.

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.

Haydon, Benjamin

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

Berger, John

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.

Evelyn Underhill

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.

Voltaire

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

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

Horton, Doug

Submit to the present evil, lest a greater one befall you.

Phaedrus

10.

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

Crowley, Aleister

11.

Whoever rewards evil for good, evil will not depart from their house.

Bible

12.

Evil is nourished and grows by concealment.

Virgil

13.

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

West, Mae

14.

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

Bible

15.

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

16.

Those that are evil have not only the good against them, but also the bad.

Bischer

17.

Evil brings men together.

Aristotle

18.

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

Hoffer, Eric

19.

Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

20.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

21.

It is a power stronger than will. Could a stone escape from the laws of gravity? Impossible. Impossible, for evil to form an alliance with good.

Lautreamont, Isidore Ducasse, Comte De

22.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

Plato

23.

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness.

Wollstonecraft, Mary

24.

By bravely enduring it, an evil which cannot be avoided is overcome

Proverb

25.

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

26.

To do no evil is good, to intend none better.

Claudius

27.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

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

Burroughs, William S.

29.

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

30.

No evil is without its compensation. The less money, the less trouble; the less favor, the less envy. Even in those cases which put us out of wits, it is not the loss itself, but the estimate of the loss that troubles us.

Seneca

31.

Of two evils, choose neither.

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

32.

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

Plato

33.

He harms himself who does harm to another, and the evil plan is most harmful to the planner.

Hesiod

34.

They that know no evil will suspect none.

Jonson, Ben

35.

There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.

Bellow, Saul

36.

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

Auden, W. H.

37.

There is hardly a man clever enough to recognize the full extent of the evil he does.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

Simone Weil

42.

Do not seek evil gains; evil gains are the equivalent of disaster.

Hesiod

43.

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.

44.

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

Aristotle

45.

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

46.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Edmund Burke

47.

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

Hesiod

48.

Evil is something you recognize immediately you see it: it works through charm.

Masters, Brian

49.

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

Mirabeau, Gabriel Riqueti

50.

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