Motivational Quotes

Evil

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

Best Quotes about Evil

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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.

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

Voltaire

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

Theodore Roosevelt

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

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

Horton, Doug

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

Buddha

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

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

10.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

11.

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

Haydon, Benjamin

12.

The Supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things -- the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.

Johnson, Samuel

13.

Evil draws men together.

Aristotle

14.

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

Wollstonecraft, Mary

15.

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

Bible

16.

The love of evil is the root of all money.

Proverb, American

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Fyodor Dostoevsky

20.

The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.

Ayn Rand

21.

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

Aristotle

22.

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

23.

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

Homer

24.

Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet.

Donne, John

25.

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

Simone Weil

26.

The evil that we know is best.

Titus Maccius Plautus

27.

We may draw good out of evil; we must not do evil, that good may come.

Chapman, Maria Weston

28.

Evil to him who evil thinks. (Honi Soit Qui Mal Pense)

King Edward the Third

29.

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

Auden, W. H.

30.

Of two evils we must always choose the least.

Thomas a Kempis

31.

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

Weber, C. J.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

35.

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

Hesiod

36.

Of two evils, choose neither.

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

37.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Mary Renault

41.

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

James, William

42.

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

43.

Evil spelled backward is live.

44.

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

Bischer

45.

Evil be to him who evil thinks.

Edward II

46.

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

Claudius

47.

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

48.

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

49.

All things may corrupt when minds are prone to evil.

Ovid

50.

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

Bellow, Saul