Motivational Quotes

Evil

There is only one good -- knowledge; and only one evil -- ignorance.

- Socrates

Best Quotes about Evil

Evil deeds do not prosper; the slow man catches up with the swift.

Homer

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

Blaise Pascal

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

Bible

But evil is wrought by want of thought as well as want of heart!

Hood, Thomas

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

Bellow, Saul

The evil that we know is best.

Titus Maccius Plautus

Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.

Weil, Simone

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

Auden, W. H.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

Plato

10.

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.

11.

They that know no evil will suspect none.

Jonson, Ben

12.

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

Masters, Brian

13.

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

14.

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

Horton, Doug

15.

Evil is a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world.

Sade, Marquis De

16.

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

Theodore Roosevelt

17.

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

18.

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

Burroughs, William S.

19.

Truly has it been said; that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

20.

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

Aristotle

21.

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

Lerner, Max

22.

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

23.

There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.

James, William

24.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

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

27.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist

Baudelaire, Charles

28.

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

29.

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

West, Mae

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Wollstonecraft, Mary

33.

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

Plato

34.

Evil brings men together.

Aristotle

35.

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

Oliver Goldsmith

36.

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

Proverb

37.

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

Bible

38.

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

39.

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

Gandhi, Mahatma

40.

Evil be to him who evil thinks.

Edward II

41.

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

Mary Renault

42.

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

Bischer

43.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Crowley, Aleister

47.

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

Hesiod

48.

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