Quotes About What Evil Is

#1. To the disgrace of men it is seen that there are women both more wise to judge what evil is expected, and more constant to bear it when it happens.

Philip Sidney

#2. I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.

Chaim Potok

#3. [after discussion about what evil is, a question asked to Elphaba on why she killed Madame Morrible]
"Why did you do it?" asked the hostess with spirit.
The Witch shrugged. "For fun? Maybe evil is an art form.

Gregory Maguire

#4. I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what's evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We're less sure about what is good. There's sort of good, good enough, could be better - but absolute good is a little harder to define.

Madeleine Albright

#5. What evil is there in seeing a man possess a woman? Why, the beasts would be more free than we!

Pietro Aretino

#6. You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers ... Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil.

Walter E. Williams

#7. But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

Susan Sontag

#8. Is there conscience in the Kremlin? Do they ever ask themselves what is the purpose of life? What is it all for? ... No. Their creed is barren of conscience, immune to the promptings of good and evil.

Margaret Thatcher

#9. Yes, this is what good is: to forgive evil. There is no other good.

Antonio Porchia

#10. Fear is the devil's most powerful tool because he can't always convince a good man to do wrong, but he can paralyze his will with fright, keeping a good man from doing what is right. It eventually results in the same end.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#11. Women think they can act like evil monsters from hell and be loved like a princess. It's as if the dragon and the witch was in them and not in the world.

Robin Sacredfire

#12. Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.

Albert Schweitzer

#13. Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of "evil," regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are "extreme" - i.e., consistent).

Ayn Rand

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. People keep asking me, 'What evil lurks in you to play such bad characters?' There is no evil in me, I just wear tight underwear.

Dennis Hopper

#17. Let the spirits witness: for theirs is the knowledge of the future - both what it would be, and what I will: You are the Queen of the Damned, that's what you are! Evil is your only destiny. But at your greatest hour, it is I who will defeat you. Look well on my face. It is I who will bring you down.

Anne Rice

#18. I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil
religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees.

Anne Rice

#19. What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.

Robert F. Kennedy

#20. Ah, what a sign it is of evil life, Where death's approach is seen so terrible!

William Shakespeare

#21. Your traveling companion, the soldier, is well trained. The two of you were planning something, weren't you?"
"Planning what? An evil scheme to steal all the Big Macs left in the McDonalds along 1-99?

Summer Lane

#22. Evil, then consists essentially in the choice of what is lower in preference to what is higher.

Athanasius Of Alexandria

#23. The truth frequently seems unreasonable; the truth frequently is depressing; the truth sometimes seems to be evil, but it has the eternal advantage, it is the truth and what is built thereon neither brings nor yields to confusion.

Henry Ford

#24. It is painful enough to discover with what unconcern they speak of war and threaten it. I have seen enough of it to make me look upon it as the sum of all evils.

Stonewall Jackson

#25. Without the voice, hands, and feet of a human being, an evil spirit is limited in what it can accomplish.

Perry Stone

#26. Evil influence is like a nicotine patch, you cannot help but absorb what sticks to you.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#27. Only by having a clear idea what virtue is can I practice evil with a light heart.

Italo Calvino

#28. When you have established that one alternative is good and the other is evil, there is no justification for the choice of a mixture. There is no justification ever for choosing any part of what you know to be evil.

Ayn Rand

#29. Give a truly good person power, and they're still a good person. Give a bad person power, and they're still a bad person. The question is always about the person in between. The one that isn't evil, or good, but just ordinary. You don't always know what an ordinary person is like on the inside.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#30. Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.

Marquis De Sade

#31. So far as my experience goes, travelers generally exaggerate the difficulties of the way. Like most evil, the difficulty is imaginary; for what's the hurry?

Henry David Thoreau

#32. Find good in what the world says is evil.

Chuck Palahniuk

#33. What is their potential for evil; what is their potential for wickedness? That's the only time that those characters become interesting to watch.

Jennifer Beals

#34. What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil, which were heaped into the other scale!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#35. It's not what enters men's mouths that's evil," said the alchemist. "It's what comes out of their mouths that is." The

Paulo Coelho

#36. What is there in common between life and chemistry; between good and evil and electrical charges, between a collection of cells and the consciousness of a caress?

Aldous Huxley

#37. What you seem to forget is that I'm not one of the embodiments of evil. I'm one of the embodiments of fear. That means I know what makes evil quake in the light of the sun.

Emily Kirby

#38. It is not a good fancy,' said the llama. 'What profit to kill men?'
Very little - as I know; but if evil men were not now and then slain it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers.

Rudyard Kipling

#39. We have seen and do see the type of evil that is within human civilization, and the Holocaust took place in European history during an advanced state of technology and form of civilization, only to become an event in that history that questioned what civilization actually means.

Laszlo Nemes

#40. Generalization is a natural human mental process, and many generalizations are true - in average. What often does promote evil behavior is the lazy, nasty habit of believing that generalizations have anything at all to do with individuals.

David Brin

#41. Our country right or wrong is an evil motto - what if your country be in the wrong? It will only compound her injury. I wish to serve the republic with an honest and fearless criticism.

Horace Greeley

#42. If it is true that we cannot possess knowledge of what is good in any absolute sense, it is equally true that we have an ethical duty to decide between what is better and what is worse.

Richard Kearney

#43. Power is not good or evil. It is what it is in the hands of the wielder.

Karen Marie Moning

#44. What then is good? The knowledge of things. What is evil? The lack of knowledge of things.

Seneca.

#45. For this is what I have learned, in my short life: do not act out of anger. Act from love or not at all. I have seen it, how anger makes a space for what I must call evil.

Kim Edwards

#46. Evil exists," he says, not flinching at the word. "I believe that what the rich have done to the poor people in this city is something that a preacher would call evil. Somebody has power. Pretending that they don't so they don't need to use it to help people-that is my idea of evil.

Jonathan Kozol

#47. A country as such does not be good or bad, only the people are good or bad, that too change by generations and this scenario is same to any nations. what India really have is a rich legacy.. nothing else

Rajesh Nanoo

#48. In Paradise, as always: that which causes the sin and that which recognizes it for what it is are one. The clear conscience is Evil, which is so entirely victorious that it does not any longer consider the leap from left to right necessary.

Franz Kafka

#49. He's Darkness. Unpleasant. I wouldn't trust him. Nor do I trust every mortal I meet. I don't know where evil comes from, and frankly it doesn't matter. Not right now. Histories and myths are renamed and reinvented eternally across the world. I can't speak to that. What I do know? This is your story.

Leanna Renee Hieber

#50. Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

Alice Walker

#51. No one who is in this world will deny that evils exist. What, then, do we say? That evil is not a living and animated substance, but a condition of the soul which is opposed to virtue and which springs up In the slothful because of their falling away from good.

Saint Basil

#52. 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

#53. What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you're not getting the whole thing that's there to be had.

Jerry Garcia

#54. The intelligent person is not one who merely knows what is good and what is bad. The intelligent person is one who, when he sees what is good, follows it, and when he sees evil, shuns it.

Abu Nuaym

#55. And I believe that if 100 million people became embodiments of peace, the world would transform, because consciousness is a collective phenomenon. And what we see as good and evil is the balance between forces.

Deepak Chopra

#56. All errors which he is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.

John Stuart Mill

#57. Some there are that torment themselves afresh with the memory of what is past; others, again, afflict themselves with the apprehension of evils to come; and very ridiculously both - for the one does not now concern us, and the other not yet ... One should count each day as a separate life.

Seneca The Younger

#58. Flee all that's evil, do all that's good, seek what is true, purse only peace, love
unconditionally.'
Warden's Oath

Megan Dent Nagle

#59. What is nobler than to tread under foot the gods of the nations, to exorcise evil spirits, to perform cures, to seek divine revelations, and to live to God? These are the pleasures - these are the spectacles - that befit Christian men.

Tertullian

#60. What's devil to some is good to some others.

Elizabeth Madox Roberts

#61. I do utterly despise dailiness as it stands. I can't abide what the world has become, the frozen-ness of our product this evil thing that we kiss the ass of every hour. I want a dailiness that is free and beautiful

Alice Notley

#62. Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good ... Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.

Pope Francis

#63. Masks camouflage the faces of both good and evil.
Keeps hidden what is a truth and what is a lie.

Patti Roberts

#64. I know indeed what evil I intend to do, but stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury, fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.

Euripides

#65. We are what we are. Nothing more, nothing less. There is good and evil among every kind of people. It's the evil among us who rule now.

Anne Bishop

#66. Love is above wisdom, just as the Virgin is above the snake. For her everything is inspiration. She doesn't bother judging what is good and what evil.

Paulo Coelho

#67. One doesn't commit evil actions in the belief that one is acting wrongly. What allows one to commit such acts is the belief that it will contribute to a greater good.

Una McCormack

#68. A rat is neither good nor evil. It just does what a rat is suppose to do. From Phantom

Jo Nesbo

#69. Some people
Are worthy of a bullet straight
to the heart because that is where
cruelty evolves into evil.
Some
humans aren't human at all,
despite how they appear.
Humanity is what lives inside
people,
harbored beneath skin, flesh,
and bone.

Ellen Hopkins

#70. I always feel that there are two powers in the universe. There is good and there is evil and it depends what side you listen to and which path you decide to follow.

William Tucci

#71. The universe isn't based on magic - there isn't one set of circumstances for the good and one for the evil. Everyone suffers sometime. The question is what you do with your suffering.

Sylvain Reynard

#72. You must give up your right to decide what is good and evil on your own terms. That is a hard pill to swallow - choosing to live only in me. To do that, you must know me enough to trust me and learn to rest in my inherent goodness.

William Paul Young

#73. Being left alone - and I am being left alone - isn't quite as much what I wanted as I thought. Is this how people become evil? I don't want to be.

Jo Walton

#74. In what way, or by what manner of working, God changes a soul from evil to good, how He impregnates the barren rock
the priceless gems and gold
is to the human mind an impenetrable mystery, in all cases alike.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#75. 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

#76. Let's take it as a "A" and "B" player. What if "A" decide to kill "B", "A" think that "B" is a evil guy... But "B" think that "A" is Evil so....

Deyth Banger

#77. That is exactly what I learned. That evil can be so ordinary.

Tess Gerritsen

#78. With life and all I've been through, I do have a belief in goodness, a good spirit. I think what people have done with religion is personified good and evil, so good's become God with 'o' out, and evil's become Devil with a 'd' added. That's my theory of religion.

Paul McCartney

#79. I think 'Magneto' is definitely an anti-hero. He's fighting for the right thing, but his methods are far too extreme. He's not above breaking the law, stretching the limits of what is moral and putting evil to work for good.

Cullen Bunn

#80. Restraints upon our natural inclinations, which left to themselves do not automatically lead us to do what is good for us and often indeed lead us to evil, are not only necessary; they are the indispensable condition of civilized existence.

Theodore Dalrymple

#81. If God is wiser that we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.

C.S. Lewis

#82. The devil may not be interested in preventing you from knowing the undone job. What he may do is to make you think it's somebody's job and not yours.

Israelmore Ayivor

#83. Another yap shook the room. Broken branches tumbled to the floor. "Wh-what's up there?" I asked, my knees shaking. I thought about the Norns' prophecy, naming me a harbinger of evil. "Is it - the Wolf?" "Oh, much worse," Blitzen said. "It's the Squirrel.

Rick Riordan

#84. THEY WANT EVIL? WE'LL SHOW THESE SUCKERS EVIL. AURADON PREP KIDS WILL GET WHAT'S COMING TO THEM. MALEFICENT'S DAUGHTER IS BACK.

Walt Disney Company

#85. In the words of William George Jordan, "Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil - the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be." T

Stephen R. Covey

#86. What is the essence of evil? It is forsaking a living fountain for broken cisterns. God gets derision and we get death. They are one: choosing sugarcoated misery we mock the lifegiving God. It was meant to be another way: God's glory exalted in our everlasting joy.

John Piper

#87. What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me.

Alan Furst

#88. 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

#89. There is nothing in nature wherein there is not good and evil; everything moveth and liveth in this double impulse, working or operation, be it what it will.

Jakob Bohme

#90. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually ... it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, then life ... every second of it ... Is all we have.

Anne Rice

#91. A lot of Christians look at Hollywood as the ultimate evil. But what it did for me is it sharpened my ability to love people and appreciate people, no matter where they're at in their lives.

Jonathan Jackson

#92. Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state what the safety valve is to the steam engine.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#93. This is what evil does; it makes choices for others in the name of religion, in the name of government, in the name of community, in the name of personal gain, that these individuals are best able to make for themselves.

John Kramer

#94. It's very much related to the American tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That's exactly what it is.

Allen Ginsberg

#95. The act of exploring what the men are, and moreover the separation of the good from the evil, is visitation; and the good are then removed, and the evil are left behind.

Emanuel Swedenborg

#96. We may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It's beyond reason.

Barack Obama

#97. What we're talking about here is goodness, mercy, and justice- and those are not fantasies. They'll exist whether you believe in them or not. However, if you believe, then you'll put your beliefs in action; and if you act you will help ensure that evil doesn't triumph. But only if you act.

Dean Koontz

#98. He was evil, and he didn't know it. He didn't know what evil was. That is to say, he was pure evil.

Jose Eduardo Agualusa

#99. No destiny is set by any birth. no matter how lowly or how high. All creatures have the right and ability to choose who and what they become...
Be it good or evil.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#100. The question of what is deserved should rarely, if ever, be asked. Asking it leads to deadly judgement, and acts of unmitigated evil. Atrocity revisited in the name of justice breeds its own atrocity.

Steven Erikson