The Possibility Of Evil Quotes

#1. Any good world would allow for us to have free will, yes?" he continued. "Can we agree to this point? But once human beings have free will, they also have the ability to make choices - and commit evil. Thus, this very good thing, free will, allows the possibility of evil into our fine world.

Libba Bray

#2. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear. By the decision to choose hope one decides infinitely more than it seems, because it is an eternal decision

Soren Kierkegaard

#3. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminates even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#4. The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?

Robert Cormier

#5. Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?

Charles Lamb

#6. Misery is evil; quarreling, a misfortune. There is only one possibility of avoiding both: a clear division of society. [Otherwise] the strong tyrannize the weak, the intelligent frighten the stupid, the inferior resist the superior, and the young mock the old.

Xunzi

#7. He suffered from an unlucky faculty - common to many men, especially Russians - the faculty of seeing and believing in the possibility of good and truth, and at the same time seeing too clearly the evil and falsity of life to be capable of taking a serious part in it.

Leo Tolstoy

#8. Evil is in the existent as its innermost possibility of refusing existence

Jean-Luc Nancy

#9. If the human race would turn from its evil ways and return to God, putting behind its sins of disobedience, idolatry, pride, greed, and belligerence, and all the various aberrations that lead to war, the possibility of peace exists.

Billy Graham

#10. Whatever our creed, we feel that no good deed can by any possibility go unrewarded, no evil deed unpunished.

Orison Swett Marden

#11. Faced with the possibility that evil existed, that pure malevolence had walked into my life and convinced me it was love, faced with the loss of everything I wanted from my life, I fainted. And dreamed dark dreams of blood.

Salman Rushdie

#12. Only a person with convictions has a genuine possibility to be tolerant. He who accepts no absolute values but clings to polite doubt cannot be tolerant but merely indifferent. He is morally defenseless in the face of evil.

Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

#13. I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

Bill Joy

#14. Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can't win ... the view that American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#15. Life is not a matter for simple optimism
for there is evil; nor for mere pessimism
for there is good. The possibility for good in the face of evil is what gives life tragic meaning.

Rollo May

#16. I do not accept history as determinism. I embrace history as possibility [where] we can demystify the evil in this perverse fatalism that characterizes the neoliberal discourse in the end of this century.

Paulo Freire

#17. I am not an absolute pacifist, because I can't rule out the possibility that under some, carefully defined circumstances, some degree of violence may be justified, if it is focused directly at a great evil.

Howard Zinn

#18. 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

#19. Far more beguiling than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive jewelry into a volcano is the possibility that evil can be defused by talking. The fantasy of justice is more interesting than the fantasy of fairies, and more truly fantastic.

Terry Pratchett

#20. And I told him that I believed in God because I had seen His opposite. I had seen all that He was not, and been touched by it, and so I could no more deny the possibility of an ultimate goodness to set against such depravity than I could deny that daylight followed darkness, and night the day.

John Connolly

#21. 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

#22. When we deny the EVIL within ourselves, we dehumanize ourselves, and we deprive ourselves not only of our own destiny but of any possibility of dealing with the EVIL of others.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

#23. When once a Republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.

Thomas Jefferson

#24. Rene Descartes, in order to raise skeptical doubts about even our firmest certainties, imagined that we might he under the influence of an evil demon, and more modern philosophers have speculated about the possibility of our being brains in vats.

Victor Reppert

#25. Natasha was happy as she had never been in her life. She was at that highest pitch of happiness, when one becomes completely good and kind, and disbelieves in the very possibility of evil, unhappiness, and sorrow.

Leo Tolstoy

#26. The theatre is a world in itself. The possibility for creating experiences that move people is increased many times over. In the end, the best stories are usually about a battle of good over evil - that has never changed.

Cat Stevens

#27. Nothing seems to tempt fate more than mentioning the possibility of something bad happening.

Donald G. Firesmith

#28. Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.

Mary McCarthy

#29. A man who knows a thing, who is aware of a given danger, and sees the possibility of a remedy with his own eyes, has the duty and obligation, by God, not to work 'silently,' but to stand up before the whole public against the evil and for its cure.

Adolf Hitler

#30. Evil devastates any possibility of an intellectual response; the tools of the rational intellect are as helpless incoping with the aftereffects of evil as it was in preventing it.

Paul Levy