quotations about evil
In some way the secret vice exhales its poison; and the evil passion, however cunningly masked, stains through to the surface.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Being against evil doesn't make you good.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Islands in the Stream
There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever -- money, for instance, or war.
SAUL BELLOW
The Dean's December
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
Destroy the man of wicked thoughts,
Like a bamboo-tree with its fruit.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka
It takes longer to cure evil than to seek it.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.
JOHN GREEN
Looking for Alaska
The wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Crossing
No evil can happen to a good man, neither in life nor after death.
PLATO
The Apology
Human beings mostly aren't [evil]. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.
NEIL GAIMAN & TERRY PRATCHETT
Good Omens
The evil you do to others you may expect in return.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Return of the King
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
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 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
Evil is a hydra with many heads, and the more of them you cut off, the more it grows! Hydras have to be starved to death, do you understand that? Kill a hundred Dark Ones, and a thousand more will take their place.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Night Watch
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
For years I've been interested in a fundamental question concerning what I call the psychology of evil: Why is it that good people do evil deeds? I've been interested in that question since I was a little kid. Growing up in the ghetto in the South Bronx, I had lots of friends who I thought were good kids, but for one reason or another they ended up in serious trouble. They went to jail, they took drugs, or they did terrible things to other people. My whole upbringing was focused on trying to understand what could have made them go wrong.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
"You Can't be a Sweet Cucumber in a Vinegar Barrel: A Talk with Philip Zimbardo", Jan. 19, 2005
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
A man that does nothing but watch evil, never will overcome it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit