Top 42 Quotes About Man's Evil Nature
#1. 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
#2. War provides an outlet for every evil element in man's nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in positions of power the vulgar and base.
C.E.M. Joad
#3. Evil men by their own nature cannot ever prosper.
Euripides
#4. To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.
Plato
#5. Promiscuous reading is necessary to the constituting of human nature. The attempt to keep out evil doctrine by licensing is like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to keep out the crows by shutting the park gate.
John Milton
#6. And like any dog, like any savage, I lay there enjoying myself, harming no man, selling nothing, competing not at all, thinking no evil, smiled on by the sun, bent over by the trees, and softly folded in the arms of the earth.
John Stewart Collis
#7. All my life, I've understood the nature of where I come from, but I never thought it might be wicked until now.
Brenna Yovanoff
#8. 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
#9. They thought man was a creature of rapacious self-interest, and yet they wanted him to be free- free, in essence, to contend, to engage in an umpired strife, to use property to get property.
Richard Hofstadter
#10. All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood All partial Evil, universal Good. - ALEXANDER POPE, An Essay on Man
Thomas H. Cook
#11. So long as you believe that man is essentially evil in nature, and a more vicious doctrine was never promulgated, it follows that he is often going to need to have his ears slapped back, and who should do this but the clergy?
Anne Roe
#12. Striving to be good is the ultimate struggle of every man. Being bad is easy, but being good requires sincere commitment, discipline and strength. We have to work hard every day just to remain good.
Suzy Kassem
#13. I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
G. M Gilbert
#14. [The Devil] Mephistopheles, when he comes to Faust, testifies of himself that he desires evil, yet does only good. Well, let him do as he likes, it's quite the opposite with me. I am perhaps the only man in all of nature who loves the truth and sincerely desires good.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#15. Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.
Alan Watts
#16. Man's nature is fundamentally good, or perhaps it is neither good nor evil. In any case, man is something to work on. We must hold fast to this fact - man is something to work on.
Klas Pontus Arnoldson
#17. The evil implanted in man by nature spreads so imperceptibly, when the habit of wrong-doing is unchecked, that he himself can set no limit to his shamelessness.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#18. The nature of man is evil; what is good in him is artificial.
Xunzi
#20. Let education kindle only those which are truly beneficial
to the human species; let it favour those alone which are really necessary to the maintenance of society. The passions of man are dangerous, only because every thing conspires to give them an evil direction.
Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach
#21. All evil, all injustice, all harm that one does to someone else - in sum, all deviation from man's normative nature - in a much more fundamental way and in a far more ultimate sense one does to oneself, and not just metaphorically but literally.
Fazlur Rahman
#22. Evil is an adjective. It is an adjective used to describe those actions of man (and their effects) that are contrary to the nature of God.
N.D. Wilson
#23. The Crooked Man believed that whatever evil lay in men was there from the moment of their conception, and it was only a matter of discovering its nature in a child.
John Connolly
#24. Man's nature is evil; goodness is the result of conscious activity.
Xunzi
#25. There is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution. - NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
J.D. Robb
#26. Man is evil, by nature man is a beast. People have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred.
Marek Edelman
#27. The essence of the Hebrew Bible, transmitted by Christianity, is separation: between life and death, nature and God, good and evil, man and woman, and the holy and the profane.
Dennis Prager
#28. When men follow justice the city blooms, the earth bears rich harvests, and children and flocks increase; but for the unjust all nature is hostile, the people waste away from famine, and a whole city may reap the evil fruit of one man's ill deeds.
Christopher Henry Dawson
#29. Man's want of original righteousness and of holy affections toward God, and the corruption of his moral nature and his bias toward evil is called depravity
Henry Clarence Thiessen
#30. Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsomely indifferent.
John Berger
#31. To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes.
Ayn Rand
#32. It is the nature of the brute to remain where he is (not to progress); it is the nature of man to seek good and avoid evil; it is the nature of God to seek neither, but just to be eternally blissful. Let us be God!
Swami Vivekananda
#33. If a man fears dogs, he may beat one with a stick when he sees it. As is the nature of all creatures, that dog will bite him. And then he may tell everyone that he was right about dogs, that they are evil. But I ask you, who is at fault in this scenario, the man or the dog?
Adriana Mather
#34. Every man, however obscure, however far removed from the general recognition, is one of a group of men impressible for good, and impressible for evil, and it is in the nature of things that he cannot really improve himself without in some degree improving other men.
Charles Dickens
#36. Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.
Mahatma Gandhi
#37. Man is nature, nature man, and all crude and raw, stinking, vicious, evil. And holding that evil lightly because the collective mind refuses to recall the spring of mountains, the vault of seas and, of course, beside that, the puny murder of millions.
John A. Williams
#38. The domestication (the culture) of man does not go deep
where it does go deep it at once becomes degeneration (type: the Christian). The 'savage' (or, in moral terms, the evil man) is a return to nature
and in a certain sense his recovery, his cure from 'culture'.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#40. The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.
Sam Keen
#41. The greatest error of a man is to think that he is weak by nature, evil by nature. Every man is divine and strong in his real nature. What are weak and evil are his habits, his desires and thoughts, but not himself.
Ramana Maharshi
#42. Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to
live at all.
Ernest Becker