Top 100 Moral Evil Quotes
#1. Moral evil is the immorality and pain and suffering and tragedy that come because we choose to be selfish, arrogant, uncaring, hateful and abusive.
Lee Strobel
#3. One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
William Wordsworth
#4. It [idolatry] nourishes mans ambition to domineer over his fellow man. Idolatry, therefore, is the source of all social and moral evil in the world.
Abba Eban
#5. It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#6. Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and morality.
Lord Acton
#7. If there was no moral evil upon earth, there would be no physical evil.
Joseph De Maistre
#8. And there is the matter of abortion. We must with calmness and resolve help the vast majority of our fellow Americans understand that the more than 112 million abortions performed in America in 1980 amount to a great moral evil, an assault on the sacredness of human life.
Ronald Reagan
#9. Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.
Henry Ward Beecher
#10. The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.
Charles Trevelyan
#11. Even papists could not see that a moral evil was detained in the soul through its physical connection with the body; and that it required the dissolution of this physical connection before the moral contagion could be removed.
Adam Clarke
#12. It is not possible to speak of the right to choose when a clear moral evil is involved, when what is at stake is the commandment, Do not kill!
Mother Teresa
#13. Fifteen days ago, he'd sat in his Christian Ethics class, rooted in the belief that murder was a grave moral evil. A capital crime punished with eternal damnation.
Pepper Winters
#14. By the very constitution of our nature moral evil is its own curse.
Thomas Chalmers
#15. Since theft is the forcible removal of somebody else's property without consent, then taxation is always, universally and forever a moral evil. Taxation
Stefan Molyneux
#16. The factory farm is ... an obvious moral evil so sickening and horrendous ... All this so we can have our accustomed veal or lamb or fried chicken or pork chop or hot dog.
Matthew Scully
#17. Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.
Pope Benedict XVI
#18. Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good.
Ayn Rand
#19. 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
#20. Nobody's born evil. I guess that's why we're drawn to violence. We're fascinated by it, but there's a moral in how you examine it.
Niels Arden Oplev
#21. The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
Ayn Rand
#22. Vainly you talk about voting it down. When you have cast your millions of ballots, you have not reached the evil. It has fastened its root deep into the heart of the nation, and nothing but God's truth and love can cleanse the land. We must change the moral sentiment.
Frederick Douglass
#23. Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances which supply good and beautiful results
the fragrance of celestial flowers
to the daily life of others.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#24. Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
Thomas Carlyle
#25. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact. And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.
Victor Hugo
#26. And now dear little children, who may this story read,
To idle, silly flattering words, I pray you ne'er give heed:
Unto an evil counsellor, close heart and ear and eye,
And take a lesson from this tale, of the Spider and the Fly.
Mary Howitt
#27. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
Ayn Rand
#28. This story has no moral. If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no remedy.
Saki
#29. To this shadowy land, that knows neither sin nor redemption from sin, where evil is not moral but is only the pain residing forever in earthly things, Christ did not come. Christ stopped at Eboli.
Carlo Levi
#30. This is a moral universe, which means that despite all the evidence that seems to be to the contrary, there is no way that evil and injustice and oppression and lies can have the last word ... that is what has upheld the morale of our people, to know that in the end good will prevail.
Desmond Tutu
#31. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moran or a lout, howeverm doesn't stop to think or reason.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#32. Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.
Ayn Rand
#33. If we think the main mission of the church is to improve life in Adam and add a little moral strength to this fading evil age, we have not yet understood the radical condition for which Christ is such a radical solution.
Michael S. Horton
#34. Without man there would be no evil. But there was also no good, nothing moral built over the world of fact. Humans were responsible for it all.
Karl Marlantes
#35. When we teach people that suspending moral judgments is a virtue, the necessary outcome is moral horror.
Peter Boghossian
#36. It's a cruel joke of the universe that the one person who makes me come alive is himself dead. And evil. His very existence defies all moral laws and all known laws of physics.
Kitty Thomas
#37. Law for the Christian is thus absolute, final, and an aspect of God's creation and a manifestation of His nature. In terms of this, the Christian can hold that right is right, and wrong is wrong, that good and evil are unchanging moral categories rather then relative terms.
Rousas John Rushdoony
#38. Rather than dividing the world between good and evil, the Left divided the world in terms of economics. Economic classes, not moral values, explained human behavior. Therefore, to cite a common example, poverty, not one's moral value system, or lack of it, caused crime.
Dennis Prager
#39. If God eliminated evil by programming us to perform only good acts, we would lose this distinguishing mark - the ability to make choices. We would no longer be free moral agents. We would be reduced to the status of robots.
Billy Graham
#40. Evil tempts every soul, but a weak soul tempts evil.
Ella Leya
#41. Human evil is a collapse of the moral faculty, but not an operating pursuing of the wrong.
Arvin Adriyan
#42. We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world ... but I am more and more puzzled about it in the moral world. There its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatsoever.
William Dean Howells
#43. I soon learned to separate theological from moral prejudices, and I gave up looking for a supernatural origin of evil. A
Friedrich Nietzsche
#44. I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.
Thomas Merton
#45. Some of the most deeply moral people I knew were least politically correct, because they actually worried about good and evil, not just what they were told was good or bad.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#46. Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.
Charles Wagner
#47. Money is not good or evil. It has no morals or intentions on its own. Money reflects the character of the user.
Dave Ramsey
#48. 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
#49. Making the truth public is a form of justice. This is a moral universe and you've got to take account of the fact that truth and lies and goodness and evil are things that matter.
Desmond Tutu
#50. They call good evil and evil good. There are those who are so easily offended that they lose their ability to ever discern any truth, and this is often derived from a sort of frenzy by way of their own masked prejudice.
Criss Jami
#51. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, it is not merely because evil deeds may be performed in the name of patriotism, but because patriotic fervor can obliterate moral distinctions altogether.
Ralph Barton Perry
#52. Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to
moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written
in it?
Richard Dawkins
#53. How can you hope to recognize good and evil for what they truly are if you have no belief in a moral authority greater than yourself?
Ted Dekker
#54. The judge punishes lawbreakers as a burning house injures its occupants. A person may be burned to death while robbing a home or saving a friend. Similarly, from a moral point of view, the judge's work is good or evil, depending on whether the laws he enforces are good or evil.
Thomas Szasz
#55. The kosmos works by harmony of tensions, like lyre and bow. Good and evil are one. On the one hand God sees all as well, fair, and good; on the other hand a human being sees injustice here, justice there. Justice in our minds is strife. We cannot help but see war makes us as we are.
Heraclitus
#56. Like language, a code of manners can be used with more or less skill, for laudable or for evil purposes, to express a great variety of ideas and emotions. In itself, it carries no moral value, but ignorance in use of this tool is not a sign of virtue.
Judith Martin
#57. It is interesting that it is not the getting of any sort of knowledge that God has forbidden, but, specifically, the knowledge of the difference between good and evil-that is, abstract and moral judgments, which, if they reside anywhere, reside in the neocortex.
Carl Sagan
#58. I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death.
Michel Houellebecq
#59. If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.
Paul Johnson
#60. No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist.
Julian Jaynes
#61. 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
#62. I don't believe there is any such definition, there is no such thing as evil, only moral judgments based on what society believes to be wrong behavior.
Nikolas Schreck
#63. A moral Agent is a being that is capable of those actions that have a moral quality, and which can properly be denominated good or evil in a moral sense, virtuous or vicious, commendable or faulty.
Jonathan Edwards
#64. The Bible is filled with intriguing stories about complex and flawed human beings who ponder immense moral questions and engage in colossal clashes with evil.
David Harsanyi
#65. Noncooperation with evil is just as much a moral duty as is cooperation with good.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#66. If the fallen lord had ever once lived with a sense of moral goodness in his whole long existence, he had certainly lost it all ... with his craven madness for domination." ~Roe'vaash "Then'diel's SONG
K. Farrell St. Germain
#67. Reason is a necessary instrument, to be used for good or evil, but it has no moral qualities.
Reinhard Bendix
#68. The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our moral nature.
Henry Ward Beecher
#69. The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#70. If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind.
John Galt
#71. Satyagraha can rid society of all evils, political, economic and moral.
Mahatma Gandhi
#72. To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.
William Penn
#73. Our opinions agree as to the evil, moral, political, and economical, of slavery.
James Madison
#74. The idea that there's good and evil knowledge ... well, that's strictly a religious point of view. Actions can be either moral or immoral, yes, but knowledge can't be labeled that way. To a scientist, to any educated man or woman, all knowledge is morally neutral.
Dean Koontz
#75. I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#76. This struggle between good and evil, fresh and stale, new and decrepit,
between the vigor of moral youth and the dotage of senility, is of positive benefit, for it keeps the perennial moral values alive
Fazlur Rahman
#77. There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.
Robert E.Lee
#78. Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.
Ayn Rand
#79. If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.
Steven Pinker
#80. For the Gnostics and for the fiction writer evil is the source of all moral understanding; the function of evil, in the best of conditions, is tension and imbalance, the eventual creation, through suffering and misfortune, of wisdom.
Susan Neville
#81. The good were worthy of note because they battled and that battle was a great story, whereas the evil were evil because of moral laziness, or weakness, and that was ultimately a dull and uninteresting affair.
Alexander McCall Smith
#82. I would rather be a little nobody, then to be a evil somebody.
Abraham Lincoln
#83. My success and my misfortunes, the bright and the dark days I have gone through, everything has proved to me that in this world, either physical or moral, good comes out of evil just as well as evil comes out of good.
Giacomo Casanova
#84. Nature knows no Moral Order. Nature doesn't give a fig for social conventions or ethical questions. And God cannot respond to or repair evil, because He is not there to witness it.
Rikki Ducornet
#85. How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!
Emile Zola
#86. The denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsion to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil iteself.
Ravi Zacharias
#87. To put it simply, when you assert that there is such a thing as evil, you must assume there is such a thing as good. When you say there is such a thing as good, you must assume there is a moral law by which to distinguish between good and evil.
Frank Turek
#88. Evil had its own logic and it was not something he, given his own moral code, would ever understand. And humans think we are monsters.
Sylvain Reynard
#89. The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods
Irving Kristol
#90. The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability.
David McCullough
#91. Conscience tells us in our innermost being of the presence of God and of the moral difference between good and evil; but this is a fragmentary message, in no way as distinct and comprehensive as the lessons of the Bible.
Billy Graham
#92. Now I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil ...
Abraham Lincoln
#94. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
Anthony Burgess
#95. If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There's none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved.
Stephen Fry
#96. The challenge for people today
and it is not and easy one
is to maintain high personal standards even while feeling that one is living in a moral sewer.
Nathaniel Branden
#97. There is nothing," he added, "quite like the moral absolutism of the young. It's easy, as a child, to believe in good and evil, in light and dark.
Cassandra Clare
#98. When we are unwilling to draw clear moral lines between free societies and fear societies, when we are unwilling to call the former good and the latter evil, we will not be able to advance the cause of peace because peace cannot be disconnected from freedom.
Natan Sharansky
#99. Deliver us from evil - from moral duplicity and weakness, from laziness and spiritual complacency, from those lies we tell ourselves from our fear of facing the truth.
Rich Mullins
#100. Though he found himself reluctant to be the direct cause of any actual killing. This wasn't Tolkien - these weren't orcs and trolls and giant spiders and whatever else, evil creatures that you were free to commit genocide on without any complicated moral ramifications.
Lev Grossman
