quotations about evil
Evil is relative.... You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger.
GLEN COOK
The Black Company
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
HANNAH ARENDT
"Thinking", The Life of the Mind
I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught--in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too--in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well--or ill?
JOHN STEINBECK
East of Eden
Evil comes and evil goes.
MY LIFE WITH THE THRILL KILL KULT & BOMB GANG GIRLS
"Mr. & Mrs. Bottomless Pit", Crime for All Seasons
Evil and good are God's right hand and left.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
God's M.O. ... is to transmute evil into good. If He is active here, He is doing that now, although our eyes can't perceive it; the process lies hidden beneath the surface of reality, and emerges only later. To, perhaps, our waiting heirs. Paltry people who will not know the dreadful war we've gone through, and the losses we took, unless in some footnote in a minor history book they catch a notion. Some brief mention. With no list of the fallen.
PHILIP K. DICK
A Scanner Darkly
Here there's no possibility of doing evil. You live in evil. In the absence of remorse. How could you do evil?
JEAN GENET
The Balcony
I desire to go through life knowing as little of evil in it as possible. To this end, I sometimes avoid looking too closely into the nature of things, studying them only so far as they seem to be good, and abandoning interest in them as soon as their darker feature begin to appear. The good only deserves a hearty interest.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Very few people see their own actions as truly evil.... It is left to their victims to decide what is evil and what is not.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Blue Moon
No man is compelled to evil; his consent only makes it his.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
A check on itself, evil subserves the economies of good, as it were a condiment to give relish to good.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery.
C. S. LEWIS
The Magician's Nephew
All men begin as good men. What they are taught as children, what is expected of them as young men, is either the armor about that goodness or the flaw that allows evil in.
DAVID WEBER
Off Armageddon Reef
Wickedness goes to great lengths and depths where it is not checked and restrained by the free and continuous expression of the indignation of good men.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The world we live in is a world of mingled good and evil. Whether it is chiefly good or chiefly bad depends on how we take it. To look at the world in such a way as to emphasize the evil is the art of pessimism. To look at it in such a way as to bring out the good, and throw the evil into the background, is the art of optimism. The facts are the same in either case. It is simply a question of perspective and emphasis.
WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE
The Art of Optimism
How many things are now called the worst evil, which are only twelve feet wide and three months long! But some day greater dragons will come into the world.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Fairly examined, truly understood,
No man is wholly bad, nor wholly good.
THEOGNIS OF MEGARA
Fragment XLI
Is the Deity able to prevent evil, but not willing, where is his benevolence; is he willing, but not able, where is his power; is he both able and willing, whence then is evil?
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"The Flying Stars", The Innocence of Father Brown
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Illustrated London News, Oct. 23, 1909