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

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

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

Ayn Rand

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

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

Cioran, E. M.

Nothing baffles the schemes of evil people so much as the calm composure of great souls.

Mirabeau, Gabriel Riqueti

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

Baudelaire, Charles

Of two evils, it is always best to vote for the least hypocritical.

Proverb, American

Evil draws men together.

Aristotle

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

Buddha

10.

Evil be to him who evil thinks.

Edward II

11.

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

Gandhi, Mahatma

12.

Evil spelled backward is live.

13.

No evil shall happen to the just.

Bible

14.

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.

Gloria Steinem

15.

By bravely enduring it, an evil which cannot be avoided is overcome

Proverb

16.

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

17.

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

Burroughs, William S.

18.

All evils are equal when they are extreme.

Corneille, Pierre

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

22.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

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

24.

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

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

Chapman, Maria Weston

26.

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

Phaedrus

27.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Edmund Burke

28.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

29.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

Plato

30.

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

Weber, C. J.

31.

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

Fyodor Dostoevsky

32.

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

Lerner, Max

33.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal

34.

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.

West, Mae

35.

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

Hesiod

36.

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

37.

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

Bible

38.

To rid ourselves of our shadows -- who we are -- we must step into either total light or total darkness. Goodness and evil.

Johnson, Jeremy P.

39.

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

Homer

40.

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

41.

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

Simone Weil

42.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

43.

Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet.

Donne, John

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

Whoever rewards evil for good, evil will not depart from their house.

Bible

47.

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

Socrates

48.

Evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree.

Proverb, Ethiopian

49.

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.