quotations about evil
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
No evil can happen to a good man, neither in life nor after death.
PLATO
The Apology
Evils are the breathings of the unjust.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
No man is permanently and fixedly evil, until he is willingly evil.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
All evils are equal when they are extreme.
PIERRE CORNEILLE
Horace
The idea that an unbridgeable chasm separates good people from bad people is a source of comfort for at least two reasons. First, it creates a binary logic, in which Evil is essentialized. Most of us perceive Evil as an entity, a quality that is inherent in some people and not in others. Bad seeds ultimately produce bad fruits as their destinies unfold. We define evil by pointint to the really bad tyrants in our era, such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and other political leaders who have orchestrated mass murders.... Upholding a Good-Evil dichotomy also takes "good people" off the responsibility hook. They are freed from even considering their possible role in creating, sustaining, perpetuating, or conceding to the conditions that contribute to delinquency, crime, vandalism, teasing, bullying, rape, torture, terror, and violence. "It's the way of the world, and there's not much that can be done to change it, certainly not by me."
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
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
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
God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.
JOHN GREEN
Looking for Alaska
Destroy the man of wicked thoughts,
Like a bamboo-tree with its fruit.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka
When there exists anywhere a state of suffering, a wrong, a condition of affairs that men of feeling deplore and that troubles the conscience of the upright, to become resigned to it is wicked. Although the evil flaunts itself before our eyes, and no remedy is in sight, we must go and seek a remedy. In the creation of the God of Justice, evil can be but a transitory state.
CHARLES WAGNER
Justice
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
If you speak not, you cannot speak evil.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: a man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.
ROD SERLING
Los Angeles Times, 1967
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
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
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
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
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