Top 100 Great Evil Quotes
#2. Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.
John Rawls
#3. Another great evil arising from this desire to be thought rich; or rather, from the desire not to be thought poor, is the destructive thing which has been honored by the name of 'speculation'; but which ought to be called Gambling.
William Cobbett
#6. NEH13.27 Shall we then hearken unto you to do all this great evil, to transgress against our God in marrying strange wives?
Anonymous
#7. I never gave it that much thought to pursue acting or anything, but I would definitely be a Bond girl if they asked me. For sure - I would make a great evil Bond girl!
Lara Stone
#8. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.
Vasily Grossman
#9. Desire is poverty. Desire is the greatest impurity of the mind. Desire is the motive force for action. Desire in the mind is the real impurity. Even a spark of desire is a very great evil.
Swami Sivananda
#10. God gives us the freedom to do great evil, if we choose. Then he uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what he chooses.
Orson Scott Card
#11. The destruction of the personality is the great evil of the time.
Ellen Key
#12. I will not attempt to show that it would be a great evil to increase the patronage of the Executive. It is already enormously great, as every man of every party must acknowledge, if he would candidly express his sentiments.
John C. Calhoun
#13. For some reason I think I could have been capable of great evil. Maybe that's the guilt.
Anonymous
#14. People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil which runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos which really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose.
George Monbiot
#15. An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. [ ... ] that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves. We are the monsters. (And the heroes too). Each of us has within himself the capacity for great good, and great evil.
George R R Martin
#16. If our wondrous kindness is evidence for God, is our capacity for great evil proof of the Devil?
Paul Bloom
#17. It is always man's ideas which drive his actions. This has, at times, resulted in great evil; but as we look around us, we cannot doubt that it has resulted in greater good.
Steven Brust
#18. To the modern spirit, disillusioned, or at least unillusioned, the great evil to be avoided is sentimentality.
Irwin Edman
#19. Most of the great evil in the world happens not at the hands of malice, but of fear. Because good people, the ones who would do the right thing, don't do it, out of that fear.
Breeana Puttroff
#21. The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain.
Martin Luther
#22. But remember, great Good will, more often than not, lead to great Evil.
Amish Tripathi
#23. And as for objects of interest, objects for the affections, which is in truth the great point of inferiority, the want of which is really the great evil to be avoided in not marrying, I shall be very well off, with all the children of a sister I love so much, to care about.
Jane Austen
#24. For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation's great cause ... There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust.
Richard Perle
#25. The State not seldom tolerates a comparatively great evil to keep out millions of lesser ills and inconveniences which otherwise would be inevitable and without remedy.
Jean De La Bruyere
#26. Let us be done with the notion that religion is confined to petty pieties and small constraints. All too often people who have possessed these pieties have wrought great evil.
A. Powell Davies
#27. Sometimes I wonder if he were raised a Red and I a Gold if he wouldn't have ended up a better man than I am now, and I a worse man than he ever could be.
For some reason I think I could have been capable of great evil.
Pierce Brown
#28. There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.
Evelyn Waugh
#29. All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.
Samuel Johnson
#30. Davy, I knew the exact time of your birth and what you would look like when the time was at hand, for I dream dreams. Now is the time. A great evil is brewing in the land that will turn the nation against itself. But you must make a stand for what is right. Be strong, young man, be strong.
David Holdsworth
#31. There should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor again excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.
Plato
#32. A human can be a real prick but maintain the capacity for good and a good hearted soul is capable of great evil. Never judge a person as absolutely one way or another because you sell the human race short when you do.
Jim McGarrah
#33. This is the great evil in wine, it first seizes the feet; it is a cunning wrestler.
[Lat., Magnum hoc vitium vino est,
Pedes captat primum; luctator dolosu est.]
Plautus
#34. 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
#35. Lo, God! I am Thy handiwork. I have sinned and have done great evil, yet I am still Thy handiwork, who hath made me what I am. So, though I may not undo that which I have done, yet I may, with Thy aid, do better hereafter than I have done heretofore.
Howard Pyle
#36. I am not an absolute pacifist, because I can't rule out the possibility that under some, carefully defined circumstances, some degree of violence may be justified, if it is focused directly at a great evil.
Howard Zinn
#37. What I learned in Rwanda was that God is not absent when great evil is unleashed. Whether that evil is man-made or helped along by darker forces, God is right there, saving those who respond to His urgings and trying to heal the rest.
James Riordan
#38. And yet you're a knight. (Rowena)
Because I have seen the great evil that is done on this earth to those who can't fight for themselves. The meek only inherit the grave while the strong go on until someone stronger stops them. (Stryder)
Kinley MacGregor
#39. It is a great evil to look upon mankind with too clear vision. You seem to be living among wild beasts, and you become a wild beast yourself. (""The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah")
William Beckford
#40. This part of Brazil offered the curious spectacle of a great evil, which has been long suffered to exist and is now advancing, gradually yet surely, to that state which must entail inevitable destruction on the existing Government of the country.
George Grey
#41. It is a great evil, as well as a misfortune, to be unable to utter a prompt and decided 'no'.
Charles Simmons
#42. As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.
George R R Martin
#43. Specialization is the great evil of civilization.
Wendell Berry
#44. Was a struggle to choose one's own destiny less worthwhile than the necessity to stop a great evil?
Diana Gabaldon
#45. The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which "God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men.
Thomas Merton
#46. But people may do great good accidentally, though with evil intentions - conversely people may do great evil though having the best of intentions.
Michael Moorcock
#47. I think shareholders are the great evil of this modern world.
Chris Martin
#48. The government of freemen is nobler and implies more virtue than despotic government. Neither is a city to be deemed happy or a legislator to be praised because he trains his citizens to conquer and obtain dominion over their neighbors, for there is great evil in this.
Aristotle.
#49. We need not only read Sacred Scripture, but learn it as well and grow up in it. Realize that nothing is written in Scripture unnecessarily. Not to read Sacred Scripture is a great evil.
Saint Basil
#50. The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.
John Stuart Mill
#51. I do not know what is happening. The reason of my waking mind tells me that great evil has befallen and we stand at the end of days. But my heart says nay; and all my limbs are light, and a hope and joy are come to me that no reason can deny. [ ... ] I do not believe that darkness will endure!
J.R.R. Tolkien
#53. When God gives you comforts, it is your great evil not to observe His hand in them.
John Flavel
#54. But because their ancestors were men of righteousness, shall we consent to the abuses of their degenerate descendants? Because they did us a great good, would we be guilty if we prevented them from doing us evil?
Jose Rizal
#55. I think I have a great deal of self-hatred, a profound feeling of fraudulence, of being detestable and evil. It's only a part of me, but it's there, and it's active.
Tony Kushner
#56. Control and violence that is best reflected in the state, are evil in themselves. In this knowledge lies the great truth of anarchism.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
#57. The two great movers of the human mind are the desire of good and the fear of evil.
Amit Abraham
#58. The forces that tend for evil are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love and courage and honesty and generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before.
Theodore Roosevelt
#59. Human misery universally arises from some error that man admits as true. We confound our fears with the idea feared, and place the evil in the thing seen or believed. Here is a great error, for we never see what we are afraid of.
Phineas Quimby
#60. The fuel for a great fire is all round them, ready to consume the evil of Plexus; we just have to wait for the spark.
Damian Wampler
#61. In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible ...
Stephen Jay Gould
#62. The disciple must have great power of endurance. Bear all evil and misery without one thought of unhappiness, resistance, remedy, or retaliation. That is true endurance, and that you must acquire.
Swami Vivekananda
#63. He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#64. The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice.
Samuel Smiles
#65. As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#66. How great is the frailty of human nature which is ever prone to evil! Today you confess your sins and tomorrow you again commit the sins which you confessed.
Thomas A Kempis
#67. If the guilt of sin is so great that nothing can satisfy it but the blood of Jesus; and the filth of sin is so great that nothing can fetch out the stain thereof but the blood of Jesus, how great, how heinous, how sinful must the evil of sin be.
William Throsby Bridges
#68. Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.
Henry Miller
#69. Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
Plato
#70. If Lord Duryodhana was an evil man, why did great men like Bhishma, Drona, Kripa, Karna, entire army of Krishna fight war on his side??
Anand Neelakantan
#71. Unless we lay our course in accordance with this principle, the great power for good in the world with which we have been intrusted by a Divine Providence will be turned to a power for evil.
Calvin Coolidge
#73. The artist, surgeon, through clay form, can only look for cure with great obstinacy until he discovers, repeatedly, that love is god's only gift that enables man to transcend his tragedy and regain his wholeness and well-being beyond the claws of evil, rampaging as evil may be.
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
#74. Yeah, I don't think you can live anywhere else
it's such a great city [New York]. L.A. is kind of a necessary evil, but man, I love going back to New York.
Will Arnett
#75. The evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come.
Thomas Jefferson
#76. It is not by sin that we attain happiness, nor is it by virtue, nor is it by that kind of divine fire by which one makes great instinctive decisions and which is neither good not evil. It is by none of these things that one reaches happiness. One never reaches happiness.
Henri Barbusse
#77. I love that I can stay connected with my fans and be able to tell them what's going on - their opinions are so important to me. But at the same time, it's very weird. I think the Internet can be a great thing but also really evil. Something can instantly hurt your feelings.
Selena Gomez
#78. The young are in great danger. Much evil results from their light and trifling reading. Much time is lost which should be spent in useful employment. Some would even deprive themselves of sleep that they might finish some ridiculous love story.
Ellen G. White
#79. In our household, which was essentially under an evil spell, my father 'Chaplin' was all the magic. A great man draws magic into himself, like reverse lightning. There's nothing to spare for anyone else.
Joyce Carol Oates
#80. The authorities? The authorities?" I laughed. "Why is it people think the authorities are some form of gods with either great justice or great, cunning evil, rather than the same plodding fools they see in their daily lives, and most of all in their mirrors?
Richard Ben Sapir
#81. And he had a dog, a nice dog. He couldn't be too evil or dangerous if he had such a great dog.
Molly Ringle
#82. Success has a great tendency to conceal and throw a veil over the evil deeds of men.
Demosthenes
#83. The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.
Ashley Montagu
#84. At drama school, I always picked the really evil roles. It's a great way to deal with your everyday emotions.
Eva Green
#85. I love the way Monteverdi's opera embodies the triumph of evil love in such a luscious way. The closing love duet is just pure amoral, liquid passion. The Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment sound great in the Albert Hall, and the Glyndebourne cast is fabulous.
Charles Hazlewood
#86. Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.
Terry Pratchett
#87. If you believe that God overrules all things for good, and only permits apparently evil happenings for good and the achievement of great ends unbeknown to you, then all is well. All is well because you believe in the sovereignty of God.
Henry Thomas Hamblin
#88. Let him! He is great but in his greatness he is no happier than we in our conflict! Goodness would not make evil; and what else hath he made? but let him sit on his vast solitary throne, creating worlds to make eternity less burthensome to his immense existence.
George Gordon Byron
#89. We do know now, all of us, that the most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good.
Katherine Anne Porter
#90. For evil to take place, the acts of a few people are not sufficient; the great majority also has to remain indifferent. That is something of which we are all quite capable.
Tzvetan Todorov
#91. A great NOW will be a great WAS! A bad NOW will always be a bad WAS, and all you can hope for is a Great GONNA BE!
Sid Caesar
#92. Put an end to so great an evil and arrive at a peace settlement whatever the outcome, and whatever the conditions.
William Of Tyre
#93. The body is poisoned through the mouth, even so is the heart through the ear ... And even if we do mean no harm, the Evil One means a great deal, and he will use those idle words as a sharp weapon against some neighbor's heart.
Francis De Sales
#94. After a time man finds that it is not happiness, but knowledge, towards which he is going, and that both pleasure and pain are great teachers, and that he learns as much from evil as from good.
Swami Vivekananda
#96. My advice: If you every have the chance to change the world, don't hesitate. Leave your great big mark.
Shannon Hale
#97. An inequality of property is the root and foundation of innumerable evils; it tends to derision, and to keep asunder the social feelings that should exist among the people of God. It is a principle originated in hell; it is the root of all evils. It is inequality in riches that is a great curse.
Orson Pratt
#98. An evil exists that threatens every man, woman, and child of this great nation. We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland.
Adolf Hitler
#99. We may not be able to stop and undo the hard old wrongs of the great world outside, but through you and me no evil shall come either in the unknown where you are going, or in this imperfect and haunted dimension of awareness through which I move.
Laurens Van Der Post
#100. A little evil is often necessary for obtaining a great good.
Voltaire
