Top 41 Quotes About The Capacity For Evil
#1. The competitive nation-state system, with all its capacity for good and evil, is spreading in the Third World and is transforming that world.
Robert Gilpin
#2. There were good and bad in every race, no matter the color of a man's skin. If Adam had learned anything in his life it was that the human soul held a great capacity for both good and evil.
Anonymous
#3. We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#4. He had the unfortunate capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it.
Leo Tolstoy
#5. I don't think I've ever been face to face with pure evil, so I don't think I've ever seen it with my own eyes. But I do understand human frailty and I do understand the capacity of people to be intermittently noble and virtuous and fallible.
Tom Hiddleston
#6. 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
#7. The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.
John Cheever
#8. I refuse to let the standards of evil people chip away at my capacity for integrity.
Stefan Molyneux
#9. Man hovers between Paradise and the Pit," Gordinus told her cheerfully. "Sometimes rising to one, sometimes swooping to the other. To ignore his capacity for evil is as obtuse as blinding oneself to the heights to which he can soar.
Ariana Franklin
#10. Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
William James
#11. This extravagant dwelling, as domineering as it was distant, brought home to me the intimateconnection between tyranny and abstraction, and put me in mind of John Berger's observation that "abstraction's capacity to ignore what is real is undoubtedly where most evil begins."
Michael Jackson
#12. He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.
Leo Tolstoy
#13. Humans have a great capacity for declaring something good or evil, without truly knowing.
Wm. Paul Young
#14. I think it is in our nature to be selfish, and in our capacity to do a great many evil things.
Danielle L. Jensen
#15. 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
#17. You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.
Ayn Rand
#18. For the first time, he considered that utter indifference might inspire not inner peace but a limitless capacity for evil.
Dean Koontz
#19. What 'Twilight Zone' did was show we all have a great capacity for good and evil.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
#20. If we don't harness their potential for good, their societies will continue to reap their capacity for evil.
Romeo Dallaire
#21. Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real. Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem Darkness:
Bernard Lown
#22. Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.
Lawrence Block
#23. I loved his enormous aptitude for compassion, adoration and respect. That was his way of showing love. He lacked the capacity for wickedness, and that caressed my belief that he might just be an angel. My angel.
S.G. Holster
#24. Man's strength resides in his capacity and desire to elevate himself, so as to attain the good. To travel step by step toward the heights. And that is all he can do. To reach heaven and remain there is beyond his powers: Even Moses had to return to earth. Is it the same for evil?
Elie Wiesel
#25. Kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.
Ray Bradbury
#26. 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
#27. Boredom is the root of all evil. It is very curious that boredom, which itself has such a calm and sedate nature, can have such a capacity to initiate motion. The effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is one not of attraction but of repulsion.
Soren Kierkegaard
#28. As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.
Desmond Tutu
#29. Jesus was no cold Superman - he was more human than any of us. Entirely pure, unweakened by evil, he was loving and open to the core. His ardor, truth, sensitivity, power, capacity for joy and pain were unlimited, and everything that happened to him happened in the immeasurableness of his divinity.
Romano Guardini
#30. Where destruction is the motive, unity is dangerous. For example, if I have evil intent and I galvanize that evil intent with many others, the capacity to destroy is immense. Where goodness is the motive, unity is phenomenal and actually has some good issues to it.
Ravi Zacharias
#31. I don't think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.
Jordan B. Peterson
#32. Reflection is not the evil; but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement.
Soren Kierkegaard
#33. Powerlessness does not mean the weakness of resignation or the passivity of an 'anything goes'. Powerlessness does not mean inability ,not having the capacity. Powerlessness means rather leaving power behind , something as disempowering.
Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback
#34. Nineveh represented the sin center of the world. Everything godless happened there; by all accounts its people were perverse, sadistic, and evil. The very fact that Jonah was even sent to such a place reveals that God's capacity to forgive is greater than our capacity to sin.
Tullian Tchividjian
#35. It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.
Charles Dickens
#36. 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
#37. If our wondrous kindness is evidence for God, is our capacity for great evil proof of the Devil?
Paul Bloom
#38. Let us not paralyze our capacity for good by brooding of man's capacity for evil.
David Sarnoff
#39. Some people give themselves over to their most evil desires, and those people becomes evil. But in general, it's reductive to think of evil as something foreign and separate from the rest of us. Evil is part of everyone. We all have the capacity to commit evil acts.
Bill James
#40. We fear the monster's capacity for evil because we recognize it in human hearts.
Nick Sagan
#41. The danger is not Islam or Christianity or any other religion. It is the human heart - the capacity we all have for evil. All human institutions with a lust for power give their utopian visions divine sanction
Chris Hedges
