Motivational Quotes

Evil

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

Best Quotes about Evil

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

James, William

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

Wollstonecraft, Mary

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

King Jr. Martin Luther

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

Lerner, Max

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

Oliver Goldsmith

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

Plato

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

Buddha

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

Bellow, Saul

Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet.

Donne, John

10.

No evil shall happen to the just.

Bible

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

Overcome evil with good. [St. Paul]]

Bible

14.

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

Bible

15.

Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other ones invariably slink in after it.

Gracian, Baltasar

16.

The end excuses any evil.

Sophocles

17.

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

Cioran, E. M.

18.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

19.

Evil spelled backward is live.

20.

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.

21.

Of two evils we must always choose the least.

Thomas a Kempis

22.

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

23.

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

Hesiod

24.

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

Hoffer, Eric

25.

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

Burroughs, William S.

26.

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

Hesiod

27.

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

Claudius

28.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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

Darwin, Charles R.

30.

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

31.

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

Simone Weil

32.

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

33.

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

Phaedrus

34.

Evil draws men together.

Aristotle

35.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

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

37.

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

Bischer

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

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

Socrates

40.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.