Good And Evil Men Quotes

#1. The difference between good and evil men is not found in the acts they are willing to commit - but merely in what name they are willing to commit them in.

Brandon Sanderson

#2. For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble; and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.

Thomas More

#3. If good men pretend to be villains, how is anybody supposed to know the difference between them?

Sarah Rees Brennan

#4. He had read about evil in Efanor's little book, and how it permeated the doings of Men, but he had never foud such doings evil, rather good and bad ... but none without self-interest, none he could not understand even in terms of his own will to have his way.

C.J. Cherryh

#5. Who hath a prospect of the different state of perfect happiness or misery that attends all men after this life, depending on their behavior, the measures of good and evil that govern his choice are mightily changed.

John Locke

#6. Since all things are good, men fail at last to distinguish which is the bane and which the antidote.

Henry David Thoreau

#7. Sometimes evil didn't need an excuse. Sometimes evil just was.

Nenia Campbell

#8. Good and evil are silly lies, nonsense put forth to plague honest sensible men.

George R R Martin

#9. The Female Western is the battle between the good and evil methods of getting the men who perform best.

Warren Farrell

#10. Bread sets free; but does not necessarily set free for good ends
that dear illusion of so many generous hearts. It sets a man free to choose: it often sets free for the bad, but man has a right to that choice and to that evil, without which he is no longer a man.

Francoise Mallet-Joris

#11. For often evil men are rich, and good men poor; But we will not exchange with them Our virtue for their wealth since one abides always, While riches change their owners every day.

Solon

#12. Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#13. Evil can be condoned only if in the beyond it is compensated by good and god himself needs immortality to vindicate his ways to man.

W. Somerset Maugham

#14. First to those universal principles I have spoken of: these you must keep at command, and without them neither sleep nor rise, drink nor eat nor deal with men: the principle that no one can control another's will, and that the will alone is the sphere of good and evil.

Epictetus

#15. Good and evil keep very exact accounts ... and the face of every man is their ledger.

James Branch Cabell

#16. In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power, and for the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent.

William Sloane Coffin

#17. Anyway, it seems to me a man can do an awful lot of evil in no time at all. Swing of a blade is all it takes. Doing good needs time. And all manner of complicated efforts. Most men don't have the patience for it. 'Specially not these days.

Joe Abercrombie

#18. It is not a good fancy,' said the llama. 'What profit to kill men?'
Very little - as I know; but if evil men were not now and then slain it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers.

Rudyard Kipling

#19. We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.

H.G.Wells

#20. Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

Thomas Hobbes

#21. The man who foolishly does me wrong, I will return to him the protection of my most ungrudging love; and the more evil comes from him, the more good shall go from me.

Gautama Buddha

#22. We grant evil freewill (or freewill to evil) is remaining in all natural men: we believe that freewill to good, is from grace and regeneration.

Henry Ainsworth

#23. Many evil men are rich, and good men poor, but we shall not exchange with them our excellence for riches.

Solon

#24. The sky and the earth and the waters and the things that are in them, the fishes, and the birds and the trees are not evil. All these are good; it is evil men who make this evil world.

Saint Augustine

#25. J. Edgar Hoover: When morals decline and good men do nothing, evil flourishes. A society unwilling to learn from past is doomed. We must never forget our history.

J. Edgar Hoover

#26. When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.

Pearl S. Buck

#27. You must cultivate your wisdom and spirit. Polish your wisdom: learn public justice, distinguish between good and evil, study the Ways of different arts one by one. When you cannot be deceived by men you will have realized the wisdom of strategy.

Miyamoto Musashi

#28. Good and evil, right and wrong were invented for the ordinary average man, the inferior man, because he needs them.

John Dall

#29. Look for good in men, and where they fail to posses it, try to build it up in them; try to increase the good in them; look for the good; build up the good; sustain the good; and speak as little about the evil as you possibly can.

Joseph Fielding Smith

#30. Adversity toughens manhood, and the characteristic of the good or the great man is not that he has been exempt from the evils of life, but that he has surmounted them.

Patrick Henry

#31. There appears to exist a greater desire to live long than to live well! Measure by man's desires, he cannot live long enough; measure by his good deeds, and he has not lived long enough; measure by his evil deeds, and he has lived too long.

Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

#32. As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of good and evil?

John Milton

#33. Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.

Ayn Rand

#34. Good men seek it by the natural means of the virtues; evil men, however, try to achieve the same goal by a variety of concupiscences, and that is surely an unnatural way of seeking the good. Don't you agree?

Boethius

#35. If that which we have found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, than what is good and what is evil?

Ayn Rand

#36. Heaven sends down its good and evil symbols and wise men act accordingly.

Confucius

#37. Of all the things of a man's soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good and injustice the greatest evil.

Plato

#38. You must be taught the Skill, boy," he said as if it were a decision painfully come by. "Evil times have come to us, and they will be with us for a long time. It is a time when good men must create whatever weapons they can.

Robin Hobb

#39. Hence it is evident that if men are pious, good and orderly, they will bear the sword for the protection of the innocent, according to the will of God, and for a terror to evil-doers, according as God has appointed and ordained.

Balthasar Hubmaier

#40. The evil that is in this world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that however isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue;

Albert Camus

#41. Religion holds a man back from the path, prevents his stepping forward, for various very plain reasons. First, it makes the vital mistake of distinguishing between good and evil.

Mabel Collins

#42. In the New Year, may not all your dreams come true, but may only all your good and right dreams come true, because men have evil dreams as well!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#43. Pity, if one can generalize, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for evil.

E. M. Forster

#44. I have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I will ... I have come to peace with myself, my God, and my cause. Blood will flow in the streets, Steve, Good vs Evil. Free men vs. Socialist Wannabe Slaves. Pray it is not your blood, my friend.

Timothy McVeigh

#45. There was never absolute good or absolute evil (though the king was definitely the exception). And even if these men were corrupt in some ways, they were also saving lives. While

Sarah J. Maas

#46. I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another.

Glen Cook

#47. For Nature is not unjust. She does not steal into the womb and like an evil fairy give her good gifts secretly to men and deny them to women. Men and women are born free and equal in ability and brain. The injustice begins after birth.

Pearl S. Buck

#48. All men make mistakes,' said the ancient Greek Sophocles. 'But a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only sin is pride.

Ken Follett

#49. In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy.

Howard Fast

#50. I reckon it's true what they say that good begets good and bad begets bad. The evil men do lives on after them, but what good they done gets buried with their bones.

Lisa Kaye Presley

#51. Our world is guided by two principles and sources: God and the devil. All that is better in the world of men has its source in God, and all that is bad has the devil as its principle and source. In the final account, all good comes from God, and all evil from the devil.

Justin Popovic

#52. Whatsoever is the object of any man's Appetite or Desire; that is it which he for his part calleth Good: and the object of his Hate and Aversion, evil.

Thomas Hobbes

#53. Angels are happier than men and devils, because they are not always prying after good and evil in one another, and eating the tree of knowledge for Satan's gratification.

William Blake

#54. Patrice had long since buried the particulars of events so painful that they caused her to resolve only to see good. With such a stance, such as dissociative split, she could walk with evil and believe it did not exist. She was Joe's perfect mate.

Judith Spencer

#55. If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Baruch Spinoza

#56. Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.

George Bernard Shaw

#57. I care not whether a man is good or evil; all that I care / Is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go! put off holiness, / And put on intellect.

William Blake

#58. Religion doesn't just cloud our minds. It asks us to deliberately deceive ourselves
to replace reason with its opposite, faith. And when men operate on faith, they can no longer be reasoned with, which makes them more dangerous than any sane man, good or evil.

James L. Sutter

#59. There is evil in the world. Things might be easier if there wasn't, if good and evil were just concepts men invented to justify themselves; we could ignore them, then. Sadly, good and evil are both very real, and very inconvenient.

Seanan McGuire

#60. I could not understand why men who knew all about good and evil could hate and kill each other.

Mary Shelley

#61. Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance; inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.

Thomas Carlyle

#62. Every man is a missionary, now and forever, for good or for evil, whether he intends or designs it or not.

Thomas Chalmers

#63. The good man shuns evil and follows good; he keeps secret that which ought to be hidden; he makes his virtues manifest to all; he does not forsake one in adversity; he gives in season: such are the marks of a worthy friend.

Bhartrhari

#64. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.

G.K. Chesterton

#65. If ever I did a man any goodof course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil which I am constantly doing by being what I am.

Henry David Thoreau

#66. There is...no easy answer to the evil and suffering problem and no easy road to its solution. But Christ tackled the matter radically and realistically by winning the allegiance of a few men and women to a new way of living...They were to be the spearhead of good against evil.

J.B. Phillips

#67. To begin with myself, then, the utterances of men concerning me will differ widely, since in passing judgment almost every one is influenced not so much by truth as by preference, and good and evil report alike know no bounds.

Petrarch

#68. Satan is the master of the ultimate double-talk and sophistry. He calls evil good and continues to confuse men with his cleverly disguised untruths.

Billy Graham

#69. A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.

William Faulkner

#70. Goodness is more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love.

Colum McCann

#71. Where princes are concerned, a man who is able to do good is as dangerous and almost as criminal as a man who intends to do evil.

Jean Francois Paul De Gondi

#72. All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.

Sophocles

#73. What is reprehensible is that while leading good lives themselves and abhorring those of wicked men, some, fearing to offend, shut their eyes to evil deeds instead of condemning them and pointing out their malice.

Saint Augustine

#74. Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#75. The radical tension between good and evil, as man sees it and feels it, does not have the last word about the meaning of life and the nature of existence. There is a spirit in man and in
the world working always against the thing that destroys and lays waste.

Howard Thurman

#76. This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade 'Know Thyself!' and taught Initiation.

Aleister Crowley

#77. The man of noble mind seeks to achieve the good in others and not their evil. The little-minded man is the reverse of this.

Confucius

#78. The man that is once hated, both his good and his evil deeds oppress him.

Ben Jonson

#79. Money alone cannot build character or transform evil into good. It cries for full partnership with leaders of character and good will who value good tools in the creation and enlargement of life for Man.

Sebastian Spering Kresge

#80. The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil.

Ernest Becker

#81. No greater evil can a man endure Than a bad wife, nor find a greater good Than one both good and wise; and each man speaks As judging by the experience of his life.

Sophocles

#82. The discrimination between good and evil is in man's soul. Every man can judge that for himself, because in every man is the sense of admiration of beauty. Happiness only lies in thinking or doing that which one considers beautiful. Such an act becomes a virtue or goodness.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#83. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.

William James

#84. There is no denying that there is evil in this world but the light will always conquer the darkness.

Idowu Koyenikan

#85. It is salutary for us to learn to hold cheap such things, be they good or evil, as attach indifferently to good men and bad, and to covet those good things which belong only to good men, and flee those evils which belong only to evil men.

Saint Augustine

#86. And in his third essay Herodius (not Herodotus, a mistaken pronunciation, perhaps) said 'We can contend with the evil that men do in the name of evil, but heaven protect us from what they do in the name of good.'

Richard Boone

#87. The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal [secular] concerns of men.

Noah Webster

#88. The spirits, they intoxicate me. I watched them infiltrate my soul. They try to say it's too late for me. Once I was promised absolution, there's only one solution for my sins. And I blame this world, for making a good man evil. Now I ain't getting into heaven, if the devil has his way.

Jon Bon Jovi

#89. Laws are partly formed for the sake of good men, in order to instruct them how they may live on friendly terms with one another, and partly for the sake of those who refuse to be instructed, whose spirit cannot be subdued, or softened, or hindered from plunging into evil.

Plato

#90. Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

Margaret Thatcher

#91. With his mind free from the inflow of thoughts and from restlessness, by abandoning both good and evil, an alert man knows no fear.

Gautama Buddha

#92. But what virtue I do have is in me and of me. Men deny the good that comes from themselves, calling it God. So do they with their won evil, calling it the Devil.

Maria McCann

#93. To do an evil action is base; to do a good action without incurring danger is common enough; but it is the part of a good man to do great and noble deeds, though he risks every thing.

Plutarch

#94. Men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God

John Irving

#95. Just as water will conform to the shape of the vessel that contains it, so will a man follow the good and evil of his companions.

Imagawa Sadayo

#96. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.

Solomon

#97. All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to stand by and do nothing.

Edward Burke

#98. Yet living and dying, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, riches and poverty, and so forth are equally the lot of good men and bad. Things like these neither elevate nor degrade; and therefore they are no more good than they are evil.

Marcus Aurelius

#99. Say that evil happens when good men do nothing. And the Democrats prove it also happens when mediocre people do nothing.

Bill Maher

#100. The will of man without the grace of God is not free at all, but is the permanent prisoner and bondslave of evil since it cannot turn itself to good.

Martin Luther