quotations about evil
What we call evil, it seems to me, is simply ignorance bumping its head in the dark.
HENRY FORD
Theosophist Magazine, Feb. 1930
Destroy the man of wicked thoughts,
Like a bamboo-tree with its fruit.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka
Being against evil doesn't make you good.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Islands in the Stream
Evils are the breathings of the unjust.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
No evil can happen to a good man, neither in life nor after death.
PLATO
The Apology
It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
letter to Bourguet, 1712
The evil you do to others you may expect in return.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
It takes longer to cure evil than to seek it.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
People aren't evil and people aren't good. They live how they can one day at a time. They come out of dust they go back to dust, dusty feet, no wings, and whose fault is that?
CARYL CHURCHILL
A Dream Play
For hence I believed Evil also to be some such kind of substance, and to have its own foul and hideous bulk; whether gross, which they called earth, or thin and subtile (like the body of the air), which they imagine to be some malignant mind, creeping through that earth. And because a piety, such as it was, constrained me to believe that the good God never created any evil nature, I conceived two masses, contrary to one another, both unbounded, but the evil narrower, the good more expansive.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
Evil is retributive: every trespass slips fetters on the will, holds the soul in durance till contrition and repentance restore it to liberty.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
All evils are equal when they are extreme.
PIERRE CORNEILLE
Horace
Shall the hag Evil die with the child of Good,
Or propagate again her loathèd kind,
Thronging the cells of the diseased mind,
Hateful with hanging cheeks, a withered brood,
Though hourly pastured on the salient blood?
ALFRED TENNYSON
Sonnet
A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
An evil thought in a soul is like a water-rat swimming in a pond at evening: the rat destroys the iridescent reflection of heaven in the water.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
In every man's heart there is a devil, but we do not know the man as bad until the devil is roused.
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
"The Case of Beauvais", Back to God's Country and Other Stories
If you speak not, you cannot speak evil.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO
Minima Moralia
For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote