Top 100 Quotes About The Nature Of Evil
#1. The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few films about the nature of evil itself.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#2. 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
#3. The nature of evil, the nature of it, it exists. It exists and I think within us we have the tools. If we have the will, we can combat it. I think the power is within us and it lies in our own conceptualization of God and positivity and compassion and love.
Vera Farmiga
#4. I tell myself I write because I want to say something true and original about the nature of evil. That is very ambitious - to say something about the human condition that hasn't been written before. Probably I will never succeed but that is what I strive to do.
Jo Nesbo
#5. Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil and very little about human beings.
Eric Hoffer
#6. When it comes to judging individuals, I do not like remarks such as 'too good to be true.' They speak as though one is rewarding the nature of evil. Yet, ironically, we still wonder where all the good people have gone.
Criss Jami
#7. He had memorized the entire Qur'an and lectured on the nature of evil, which, like a shadow, cannot exist independently of the good silhouettes.
Anthony Marra
#8. The judge should not be young, he should have learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation of the nature of evil in others.
Plato
#9. 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
#10. God seldom suspends the laws of nature, just as God does not remove free will to keep evil people from doing evil things.
Adam Hamilton
#11. Given is the word. Given publicly, on the first Good Friday, on a hill, in the sight of all, was the visible demonstration of the only permanent way to overcome evil. Human nature demands something more enduring than the unquiet equilibrium of rival powers.
Muriel Lester
#12. Was not merely weak but also evil to throw away your life when so many had their lives or the promise of their future taken from them by cruel people or by the brutal forces of nature.
Dean Koontz
#13. 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
#14. Only one kind of species of animals bites the hand that feeds them - mankind.
Fakeer Ishavardas
#15. 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
#16. Communism starts with the proposition that there are no universal truths or general truths of human nature.
Richard M. Nixon
#17. 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
#18. Being good or being evil is not something that is inherent in our nature over which we have no control, rather we define ourselves by the choices we make, moment by moment, situation by situation. All it takes is an act of will to be the best that we can be.
Laurence Overmire
#19. Wisdom consists of knowing how to distinguish the nature of trouble, and in choosing the lesser evil.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#20. Karou saw them with her human eyes, this army she had rendered more monstrous than ever nature had, and she knew what the world would see in them if they flew to fight the Dominion: demons, nightmares, evil. The sight of the seraphim would be heralded as a miracle. But chimaera? The apocalypse.
Laini Taylor
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Certainly, it includes that. I want the story to be interpreted in as many ways as possible, and of course, the bad blood aspect of it included. For instance, perhaps this is a story not about the hereditary nature of evil, but rather you could interpret it from a different perspective, too.
Park Chan-wook
#26. In any event, we must remember that it's not the blinded wrongdoers who are primarily responsible for the triumph of evil in the world, but the spiritually sighted servants of the good.
Fyodor Stepun
#27. This, I think, is the crux of evil in this world, Majesty: those who feel entitled to whatever they want, whatever they can grab. Such people never ask themselves if they have the right. They consider no cost to anyone but themselves.
Erika Johansen
#28. Evil is termed as sin because it has the power to attract the mind. It acts upon our mind and heart to do what nature desires, even when such acts are prohibited by the laws of society. We feel guilty doing things that nature has designed as perfectly natural.
Awdhesh Singh
#29. Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.
Honore De Balzac
#30. The first evil choice or act is linked to the second; and each one to the one that follows, both by the tendency of our evil nature and by the power of habit, which holds us as by a destiny
Tryon Edwards
#31. According to the laws of nature, one should destroy the other, but in love neither good nor evil, there is neither construction nor destruction, there is merely movement. And love changes the laws of nature.
Paulo Coelho
#32. Evil is the most difficult problem in the world. It is also the strongest objection to God's existence. If God does exist, it is also the most problematic challenge to his nature and power. As a Christian, it is my greatest temptation for doubt and unbelief.
Jon Morrison
#33. To have thought that, with the right tests and the right lectures, I could be made into a cold-blooded, heartless killer. To have thought that I could ignore the beating of my own heart long enough to stop the beating of another's.
Jessica Khoury
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. He had spent much of his childhood perched on the coast, with the taste of salt in the air: this was a place of woodland and river, mysterious and secretive in a different way from St. Mawes, the little town with its long smuggling history, where colorful houses tumbled down to the beach.
Robert Galbraith
#38. I hope you haven't given up on the S.Q.'s of the world, Reynie. As you see, there are a great many sheep in wolves' clothing. If not for S.Q.'s good nature, we'd never have escaped.
Trenton Lee Stewart
#39. Three quarters of these people know
Instinctively what ought to be
The nature of society
And how they'd live there if they could.
If it were easy to be good,
And cheap, and plain as evil, how,
We all would be its members now...
W. H. Auden
#40. There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.
Edward Gibbon
#41. There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself
James Nayler
#42. Here was the heart of dread. It was not fearsome. It was fetid, noxious, hopeless. A deep and exhausting misery, a crevasse so bottomless that, in the blackness, all one could make out were the contours of despair.
Laura Tillman
#43. In a war the most dangerous thing is to understand the enemy. To understand is to forgive. And we
have no right to do that - we never have had, not since the creation of the world.
Sergei Lukyanenko
#44. The laborious pastor, the fervent minister, the ardent evangelist, the faithful teacher, the powerful intercessor, can all trace the birth of their zeal to the sufferings they endured through sin, and the knowledge they thereby attained of its evil nature.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#45. 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
#46. All the evil in the world comes from us bothering with each other,
Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil.
Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us.
To want more is to lose this, and be unhappy.
Alberto Caeiro
#47. 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
#48. I think it is our nature to believe evil always has an ugly face," he said, ignoring my question. "Beauty is supposed to be good and kind, and to discover it otherwise is like a betrayal of trust. A violation of the nature of things.
Danielle L. Jensen
#49. The Law is not in fault, but our evil and wicked nature; even as a heap of lime is still and quiet until water is poured on it, but then it begins to smoke and burn, not from the fault of the water, but from the nature of the lime, which will not endure it.
Saint Augustine
#50. God has created too few unmixed evils to warrant the belief that death is one of them. In all things else in nature, goodness so abounds that we are authorized to infer that it does not stop even at the grave. It is only that her footprints have become invisible.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#51. [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
#52. There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.
Benjamin Haydon
#53. This Lord of natures today was transformed contrary to His nature;
it is not too difficult for us to also overthrow our evil will. Hymns of the Nativity, Hymn 1:97, pg. 74 in Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1989).
Ephrem The Syrian
#54. Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself -my disgust at her barbarity -clumsiness -darkness -bitter mockery of herself -is the most desolating.
John Ruskin
#55. I don't care how the sin ledger stands. There seem to be a number of artificial standards of good and evil that don't really relate to true merit or demerit. Maybe the official system of classification has failed to keep up with the changing nature of our society.
Piers Anthony
#56. 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
#57. For the gifts of Nature belong to good and evil alike; but the proper gift of the elect is grace - that is, love - and they who bear the mark thereof are held worthy of everlasting life.
Thomas A Kempis
#58. Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.
Ayn Rand
#59. Human nature is so constituted that the propensity for evil is always intensified by external circumstances, and the morality of the individual depends much more on the conditions of his existence and the environment in which he lives than on his own will.
Mikhail Bakunin
#60. It was a sort of peace I have rarely enjoyed since. As if we were the only two souls on earth - all of nature ours to enjoy. I wondered why a creator who had dreamt such beauty would have slandered it with such evil. Such grief. Why He had not been content to leave it unspoilt. I still wonder.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#61. Our judgements of good and evil ... presuppose God as the standard. If there's no God, there's neither good nor evil. There's just nature doing what it does
Peter Kreeft
#62. Do not look for evil. Look for the goodness of God all around you. As you look for signs of His Presence, many more opportunities will occur for you to bless people and share God's true nature.
Graham Cooke
#63. It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil.
James F. Cooper
#64. The spirit is the cause of all our thoughts and body-action, and everything, but it is untouched by good or evil, pleasure or pain, heat of cold, and all the dualism of nature, although it lends its light to everything.
Swami Vivekananda
#65. When the mother herself kills her son she goes against her own nature, against her own instinct. People talk about 'choice', but when a woman does that, when she destroys the life of her unborn child, then we have arrived at the limit. The level cannot go higher regarding evil.
Jim Caviezel
#66. I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
Isak Dinesen
#67. The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#68. The tombstone over the grave of the conscience always reads: "Human Nature".
Stefan Molyneux
#69. Everything in the universe is good to the degree it conforms to the nature of God and evil as it fails to do so. - A.W. Tozer
John Bevere
#70. I'm all in favor of looking deeply into as much as we possibly can. I'm not afraid of knowledge ... With all new technology, weapons inevitably emerge ... Evil comes out of the human heart. It doesn't come out of nature.
Richard Preston
#71. The very name 'Manson' has become a metaphor for evil ... He has come to represent the dark and malignant side of humanity, and for whatever reason, there is a side of human nature that is fascinated with ultimate evil.
Vincent Bugliosi
#72. Zazen is seated meditation-the opposite of contemplation-the emptying of the mind of all thoughts in order simply to be. In the midst of all evil, not a thought is aroused in the mind-this is called za. Seeing into one's Self-nature, not being moved at all-this is called Zen.
Huineng
#73. To do evil for good is human corruption; to do good for good is civil retribution; but to do good for evil is Christian perfection. Though this be not the grace of nature, it is the nature of grace.
Thomas Secker
#74. The sick-room becomes the scene of intense convictions; and among these, none, it seems to me, is more distinct and powerful than that of the permanent nature of good, and the transient nature of evil.
Harriet Martineau
#75. You know it already that each one of us is the effect of the infinite past; the child is ushered into the world not as something flashing from the hands of nature, as poets delight so much to depict, but he has the burden of an infinite past; for good or evil he comes to work out his own past deeds
Swami Vivekananda
#76. There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
Walter Lippmann
#77. To misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it.
Joel C. Rosenberg
#78. 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
#79. The nature of man is evil; what is good in him is artificial.
Xunzi
#80. If society will adopt the rule of nature, and justify no marriage without a supreme affection, the evils of marriage without love will be sufficiently cured. Those who marry without the consent of Nature may securely expect trouble.
Joseph Cook
#81. Some people have the disease of criticising all the time. They forget the good about others and only mention their faults. They are like flies that avoid the good and pure places and land on the bad and wounds. This is because of the evil within the self and the spoiled nature
Ibn Taymiyyah
#83. 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
#84. Discovery is the chance they never had, to tell, on oath, how wickedness infects a life. One's only life. Beyond one's will, evil comes, looking for a surprise soft spot, a place to inject its poison.
Kaimana Wolff
#85. 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
#86. Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
John Berger
#88. 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
#89. 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
#91. A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.
Joseph Addison
#92. In the first place, [his eyes] never laughed when he laughed. Have you ever noticed this peculiarity some people have? It is either the sign of an evil nature or of a profound and lasting sorrow.
Mikhail Lermontov
#93. 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
#94. Man's nature is evil; goodness is the result of conscious activity.
Xunzi
#95. 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
#96. The ultimate evil is the weakness, cowardice, that is one of the constituents of so much human nature. When, rarely, unalloyed nobility does occur, its chances of prevailing are slim. Yet it exists, and its mere existence is reason enough for not wiping the name of mankind off the slate.
John Simon
#97. Nature evaluates a character on the basis of its merits, not demerits.
Raheel Farooq
#98. Dissimulation, even the most innocent in its nature, is ever productive of embarrassment; whether the design is evil or not artifice is always dangerous and almost inevitably disgraceful.
Jean De La Bruyere
#99. Nature seems to welcome defiance of conventions, and to say, with a smile, 'So, the truant has come back again!' ("Absolute Evil")
Julian Hawthorne
#100. Walking in darkness didn't mean having to become one with it, did it? Could we not live with our inner natures without embracing the true evil we all are privy to? Humans are no less evil than the worst of vampires at times. Surely right and wrong couldn't be so perfectly cut and dried.
Trina M. Lee
